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Every time a sound is played in a game, a small amount of processing power is required from the game system's processor. While audio puts a relatively small load on the processor, the processor is also used for other more demanding aspects of the game, such as 3D graphics.
Every sound played in a game requires something called a voice through which the sound is played, not to be confused with the Sound Voice object used for dialogue. You can think of a voice as the mechanism that produces the sound in the game. The more active voices there are, the more processing power is used.
Some objects in a game have the potential to use more voices than others. For example, in Cube there's a poison gem that can be thrown at a rapid rate, so the sounds it makes each time it's thrown start to overlap each other. This can cause the voice count to increase quickly. You'll start by profiling the game while firing the poison gem to see how many voices are used.
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Run Cube so you can connect to it.
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Launch Wwise and open a project file. Make sure you open the Module 20 project file.
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Connect to Cube so you can test your changes in the game.
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From the menu bar, click Layouts > Profiler (F6).
The Profiler layout opens.
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In the Wwise toolbar, click the Start Capture button (Alt+C, Option+C on macOS).
Information starts to accumulate in the Capture Log and a yellow cursor moves across the Performance Monitor graphs at the bottom of the layout.
At the beginning of this module, you ran the game Cube and connected Wwise to it.
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Return to Cube. From the starting position, turn to your left. Walk into the green poison gem to collect it, and then press 3 to put the poison gem in your wand.
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Click and hold to fire the poison gem as quickly as possible. Continue until the remaining gem count is 0.
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Return to Wwise and click the Stop Capture button (Alt+C, Option+C on macOS).
In the Capture Log, you can see that various Events and Actions were triggered during gameplay. Notifications indicate when a Sound SFX was playing or finished playing. For this exercise, you're interested in the poison gems, so you'll filter out everything else.
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In the Capture Log, type poisongem in the text filter field.
Objects that don't include poisongem in their name are removed from the Capture Log.
In the Performance Monitor at the bottom of the layout there are multiple graphs. The top graph shows overall CPU usage, which goes up as the audio action gets more intense. Below that, there's a graph indicating the number of physical voices.
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In the Performance Monitor, drag the yellow time cursor to the left until you find the highest peak in the Number of Voices (Physical) band. In the pane on the right side of the Performance Monitor, scroll down to see the exact value of that parameter at the time of the peak.
![[Tip]](/images/wwise101/?source=wwise101&id=tip.png)
In the upper-right corner of the Performance Monitor, you can click the View Settings button to add more bands to the view.
In this example, the maximum number of voices was 21. You might see a different number depending on a few factors, such as how quickly you fired the poison gem and which other sounds were playing at the same time. Next, you'll put some limits on voice count to see if you can lower this number.