I've had some amazing ( horrible ) adventures in low latency music stuff lately. It has made me think about going back to the hardware side of music production. Previously I was an ableton-only dude.
All of the vst plugins are CPU bound and even though i have a top of the line i7 and 32 gigs of ram, my computer slows to a crawl when editing even moderate sized songs.
Specifically, there is an nvidia bug that introduces latency to real time audio, making guitar and other live performance unplayable.
I don't know how this compares to your i7, but I dabble around using Pro Tools w/ about 15 or 20 tracks at a time with several effects running in unison, on an M1 Pro processor w/ only 16 gigs RAM, and I typically stay under 20% usage according to Activity Monitor.
I mostly play guitar and don't notice the latency in most effect chains that I use.
All of the vst plugins are CPU bound and even though i have a top of the line i7 and 32 gigs of ram, my computer slows to a crawl when editing even moderate sized songs.
Specifically, there is an nvidia bug that introduces latency to real time audio, making guitar and other live performance unplayable.
It really sucks! At least it has finally been ack'd (Increase in DPC latency observed in Latencymon [3952556]): https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/531.18/531.18-win11-w...
This has been a problem for YEARS. Hopefully they will finally fix it.