Serious Audio/Program Lag - Aduio Reactive Particle System

I'm creating a pretty large audio reactive particles (and more) patch, my first patch this size. Close to the end of building the patch, the audio, and, by the looks of it, most of the processing has dramatically slowed down to where its playing my tracks at half speed with lots of clicking and artifacts.

I tried checking the CPU usage and it says its averaging at 0.7%. Even after deleting a few of the more demanding elements its still an issue. I've also tried reducing unnecessary constant processing in the background, and as many unnecessary display elements as I can but it's still the same. Yesterday I removed some metro objects that were running faster than the world fps (30) and thought that fixed it, but it's still happening.

Also, another potentially related issues: whenever I play stems from my breakbeat tracks it never plays them in sync and it's very noticeable.

I'm pretty new to max so I'm not sure if I've done a lot of things, like the controls, in a more complicated way than needed and that's the issue.

This is for an assessment due in about one week, I've worked so hard on it and really enjoyed it but now I'm just worried I've added too much, unless there's another fixable issue I'm missing.

Laptop:

• 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13620H 2.40 GHz

• 16GB Ram

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, 8GB GDDR6

• Running audio through a Scarlett 4i4

• I'm using an 2nd external monitor if that makes a difference

Here's a video showing the lag:

(Apologies for the gaps, was trying to show how it worked better upon loading and just had difficulty moving through the patch as even that's kinda laggy)

Any help or advice would be really appreciated, thanks! :)