FabFilter

I've used pro q 2 on a smaller project before and didn't notice *too* much that it was a drain on processor, but on a slightly larger project it's almost impossible to run without crashing playback. Every instance is on low latency. Does anyone else have this problem? I've got 7 instances running (four more on tracks I've since frozen, trying to get processor space). I deactivated my only reverb bus, but I'm not 100% sure that bypassing a plug or deactivating a track actually kills the plug's drain on processor in ProTools. I'd love to use this as my go-to, but it's essentially unusable for mixing a band.

Mac OS 10.12.6
MacBook Pro Retina 13-inch, late 2013
2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 (I think it's Haswell)
ProTools 12.7.0

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

I've run giant projects with tons of other plugs and had way better success. This is a nice eq when it works.

Wow no, this shouldn't be. In the past I used tons of Pro-Q2's in one session.... on a 2012 MacBook Air.
It's know for its efficiency, CPU wise. No clue what is going on here. Are you by any chance using them all in lineair phase mode? Try natural or zero latency instead, it may improve things.

I definitely double checked that. On the two sessions I've used it, it's definitely the thing that's causing the slowdowns. I'm finding myself copying the settings to other EQs because I can't be letting this slow down this project. Shame to have a $200 eq i can't even use :-P

Have you checked whether it happens with all the Pro-Q guis closed? A lot of the time such mysterious huge cpu usage of plugins is due to OpenGL driver bugs.

Pro-Q itself uses maybe 20% more cpu than f.ex. ReaEQ or Waves Renaissance EQ, so it’s far from a cpu hog.

"Shame to have a $200 eq i can't even use :-P"

First, that's what demo versions are for ^^
Second, as you can see from the reactions this is not the normal case.
Third, you probably already have filed a support ticket, right!? If anyone can help you, then only the FabFilter team.

It's possible that the use of graphics acceleration in Pro-Q actually influences the CPU speed, throttling the CPU down, especially with your MacBook Pro which has limited GPU power and cooling ability. We've seen this with some other systems, but it definitely doesn't occur on all small laptops, only some of them.

You could try to turn off graphics acceleration to see if that makes a difference:
www.fabfilter.com/support/faq/#how-can-i-disable-graphics-acceleration-on-my-computer

Cheers,

The problem is definitely worse when a pro q2 window is open. In fact, it absolutely won't play back when a pro q window is up. I'll try the graphics acceleration. I hope it makes my other stuff work better too!

This resulted in a marginal improvement. I'd say that playback crashes 50% of the time a pro q2 window is open instead of 100%, and the RTA is choppy and laggy (but that was to be expected). I don't see what I'm doing wrong compared to the rest of you.