When using Task Manager CPU Usage monitor, I am noticing a jump from 1-5% when idle (not playing or recording) to over 60% when doing any of the following in the Track View:
 
1.  While moving the curser over the tracks in the tracks pane ONLY when the Aim Assist is active.  (It drops to about 7-16% when Aim Assist is off)
2.  Resizing a track size vertically or horizontally.
3.  Continuously toggling a mute or solo button off/on.  (not that you would do this normally, but you may toggle multiple channels in a quick fashion)
 
When playing a song with ~20 tracks of audio it only goes up to ~30% CPU even when zoomed in and having to redraw the waveforms every second.
 
I have an NVidia GeForce 210 and run 2 monitors.  I have the latest drivers installed.  
 
 
 

IIRC, do you have video acceleration enabled?

FYI: I would only look at the CPU being a problem if your getting pops and clicks or any kind of performance problem.

Do you mean the Windows setting? 
 
..Display/Screen Resolution/Advanced Settings/Troubleshoot,    The setting is greyed out and I cannot change it.  Does this mean the setting moved to my NVidia Control Panel?

How does the X2 CPU meter differe from windows CPU meter.  My X2 CPU is usually ~20% or less, System memory seems to stick at 18%, and Disk is around 10%.   This when playing about 10-30 tracks of audio.  The X2 Meters never indicate any issues.
 
However, the windows task manager CPU is often hitting over 80% now causing heavy lag, but no audio glitches.  SONAR falls behind on kestrokes.  I tried zooming in/out many times horizontall and moved the mouse around SONAR fell easy 50+ kestrokes behind but evetually caught up.  It was interesting to watch :)
 
My basic computer specs are:
 
Windows 7 Professional
Service Pack 1
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @3.00GHz 3.00GHz
64-bit Operating System
4GB RAM
 
NVidia Geforce 210 Video card
2 monitors runnign 1920 x 1080
 
 
 

martinv


When using Task Manager CPU Usage monitor, I am noticing a jump from 1-5% when idle (not playing or recording) to over 60% when doing any of the following in the Track View:
 
1.  While moving the curser over the tracks in the tracks pane ONLY when the Aim Assist is active.  (It drops to about 7-16% when Aim Assist is off)
2.  Resizing a track size vertically or horizontally.
3.  Continuously toggling a mute or solo button off/on.  (not that you would do this normally, but you may toggle multiple channels in a quick fashion)
 
When playing a song with ~20 tracks of audio it only goes up to ~30% CPU even when zoomed in and having to redraw the waveforms every second.
 
I have an NVidia GeForce 210 and run 2 monitors.  I have the latest drivers installed.        

I see the exact same behavior on items 1 & 2 above, and I am running a brand new AMD video card with the latest drivers, so that rules your video card out.  I haven't tried item 3, but it sounds like I probably would, (will try when next in the studio) as your other symptoms match mine exactly.


The other thing that kills performance for me is having any tracks with AudioSnap enabled.  Even if the tracks are collapsed within a folder, just being there causes major lag of the whole GUI with every screen redraw - so much so that my workflow is almost completely broken.  I stop & start playback a lot to find areas of interest, and the lagging makes this very difficult.


I think this is just Sonar X2 and how it works.  It's in need of some work in the GUI department, because the performance is pretty bad right now.

Bill, you should always bounce to clip your Audiosnap material once you've finished with it, otherwise you'll get exactly the sort of performance you're seeing.

Martin, you seem a little on the light side for your system Ram, 4Gb isn't an awful lot by today's standards - increasing this to 8Gb (or more) should give you much better performance

Bristol_Jonesey


Bill, you should always bounce to clip your Audiosnap material once you've finished with it, otherwise you'll get exactly the sort of performance you're seeing.

Martin, you seem a little on the light side for your system Ram, 4Gb isn't an awful lot by today's standards - increasing this to 8Gb (or more) should give you much better performance

Sorry Jonesey, I can't agree.
 
In the midst of an editing session, my workflow gets broken by the poor performance before I've even finished editing - well before I'm actually ready to bounce.  I've been trying to AudioSnap some multi-track drums from a live recording session and really, AudioSnap and the resulting sluggish GUI is making it very hard work.
 
Quite simply it's broken and needs fixing.
EDIT: Oh and regarding your suggestion that Martin's problem is down to memory - I have 16 GB of RAM and an 8-core processor and I am seeing exactly what he is.

I think Jonesey was talking about a Bounce to Clips not a track bounce.

Maybe I'm wrong but...

So, if you use audio snap on a clip, your sound gets much better after you use a bounce to clip. This just renders the audio snap using a higher resolution getting all that processing work over with. It leaves the clip in place, just adjusted. The original file should still be in your audio file if you need to revert beyond the ctrl+z undo range.

So, you can then use audio snap on a whole bunch of clips... bounce to clips... then mix your mix... then bounce to tracks when you're ready.

This is the pretty standard way to go about it. All the videos I've watched (and I've watched tons of them), all the Power! books I've read (2) demonstrate this identically.

I have seen laggy graphics once.. after some hours of frustration i launched in safe mode and graduallly added the VSTi one by one. the culprit was a vsti i had loaded.. it was not being used but simply sitting in the dock..

I am sure there are many reasons for bottlenecks causing graphics issues, as there are more variations in project than there are system setups.

gswitz


I think Jonesey was talking about a Bounce to Clips not a track bounce.

Maybe I'm wrong but...

So, if you use audio snap on a clip, your sound gets much better after you use a bounce to clip. This just renders the audio snap using a higher resolution getting all that processing work over with. It leaves the clip in place, just adjusted. The original file should still be in your audio file if you need to revert beyond the ctrl+z undo range.

So, you can then use audio snap on a whole bunch of clips... bounce to clips... then mix your mix... then bounce to tracks when you're ready.

This is the pretty standard way to go about it. All the videos I've watched (and I've watched tons of them), all the Power! books I've read (2) demonstrate this identically.

I was definitely talking about a bounce to clip - this is what I said in my post.

And I still maintain that 4Gb of Ram is more or less borderline for running X2 & Win 7.

Martin - another thing that might be causing your gui refresh problems is you've got the Pause key on your keyboard pressed?