Hi,
Unfortunately each PC has its on story and needs to be handled separately. We will be glad to help if possible even that means we have bug in MM and need to fix it.

Wish you luck. I am glad that we have found the actual reason for high CPU. MM5 is Chromium based that renders realtime and easy to customize, so many things depends on chromium, like you pointed when you disable many visual enhancements.

Personally I am glad that I helped.

Yes, I intend to buy a new laptop but anyway many thanks @peke for your detailed post !!

Maybe I'll use your post info if I decide to keep my old PC and upgrade it.
Also your post might be useful for others with old PC's.

Hi,
As I suspected your PC specs are very very low. It is 11+ years old and behavior is more than normal with that CPU and integrated Graphics card.
There is no Hardware acceleration on any GPU tasks and it is DirectX 9.0c compatible.

If you do not want or do not have money for upgrade I would suggest to spend few bucks and do at least upgrade to Newer CPU and GPU, but I guess that you get Motherboard+CPU(With cooler)+GPU+4GB Memory (DDR3 as you now have DDR2) for <50 USD.

Your Motherboard is 11+ years old it needs to be upgraded https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/G31M-S/#BIOS You are using bios version 1.90 and there are functional upgrades.

I hope you can ship some to your country.
Upgrade CPU based on https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/G31M-S/#CPU : Q9450 for less than 20 USD Like this one https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Core-2-Quad-Q9450-2-66GHz-Quad-Core-CPU-Processor-SLAWR-LGA775-CPU346/233885665129
Upgrade GPU suggestion ATi Radeon GPU series 5450/6450/7570/8490 and spend no more than 10 USD eg. like this one https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-Radeon-ATI-102-C26405-1GB-Graphics-Video-Card-0VVYN4-VVYN4/224304694990

Not sure what CPU cooler you have but I think you can buy good used 775 CPU cooler for less than 10 USD.

With that upgrade you would get at least 20-30% speedup in desktop use and overal PC performance, but you really need whole PC upgrade.

NOTE buying SSD HDD ill not get you any more speed as Motherboard is SATA2 and can't utilize more than 1/3 of SSD speed.

screenshots:

https://i.imgur.com/ai6h4Cp.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/x32GLEY.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/35CkRdX.jpg

Hi,
OK, looks like you have CPU software decoder instead of GPU, but also https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/42800/intel-pentium-processor-e5500-2m-cache-2-80-ghz-800-mhz-fsb.html is very low spec now 10 year old CPU.

Can you please make screenshot of these apps:
- GPU-Z: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/ (Start Page)
- CPU-Z: https://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/cpu-z_1.95-en.zip (CPU and Motherboard tabs)

My PC - https://i.imgur.com/GrBuux4.png

Using Process Explorer :
Full screen Visulaization - "CPU Usage" - avg. 95%

Visulaization - OFF :
Without Tiny Visulaizer "CPU Usage" - avg. 10%
With Tiny Visulaizer "CPU Usage" - avg. 23%

An important consideration of the visualization is the size of the canvas (how big the visualization picture is on your screen). The bigger it is, the more resources it will need for rendering. This is why the tiny visualization on the bottom of the screen takes such a small amount of resources. When you had the visualization on, was it in the corner of the screen, or was it taking up the entire window?

Hi,
If you refer to small spectrum analyzer in player, it is enabled by default, but on all PCs i have tested CPU usage have never went over 3% and that was very low end 2 Core/2 Threads CPU with integrated GPU (graphics).

I am curious can you make screenshot of your My Computer (This PC) properties?

Thank you @Mipi for the explanation (As soon as I found out what caused the high CPU I've disabled the Visualization and the Visualizer).
When I had the small "Visualizer" ON the CPU was not going below 8%. It took me some time to find out what caused this high CPU.
I can't remember if the "Visualizer" was enabled when I first installed MMW.
So maybe if its ON by default should MMW devs change it to OFF and add a warning that enabling it might take high CPU (it is especially important to laptop users who care about battery life).

The visualization is as simple as possible. In case it is too CPU time consuming and makes it some problems, I could only recommend to not use it. It is based on Chromium rendering and we could not optimize it much. Anyway it should not affect ability of responses of the application.

I'm using "Basic bars". Same 99% CPU on the other visualizations as well except Milkshake (Milkshake gives me no visualization).

What Visualization are you using? I'm seeing 10-13% CPU with MMW5 the active window and less when not the active window with Milkshake with Che - Escape Preset.

MM5 - High CPU on visualization

STR (steps to reporoduce):
1. Launch MM5
2. Play a track
3. Right-Click the bottom bar and tick "Visualization" and the CPU goes from 2% to 99% (I use process explorer to watch the CPU). High CPU but MM5 still responds and doesn't crash.

Here's the dbgview of this STR. - https://drive.google.com/file/d/10ZUDUO6Rja-25jXN0PJafHdlwA1Svk4o/view?usp=sharing

Another related issue:
If I tick Layout > Player > Metadata > Visualizer to ON then CPU goes from 2% to 8% . This isn't bad as 99% but still it's too high.

Thanks in advance

Win 7 x64
MM5 2302