2015 MBP 2.5ghz vs 2016 iMac 5K 4GHz Performance comparison

Cubase
1

Sooooo…

I bought a 2016 iMac 5k retina with top spec 4GHz Processor / 32GB Ram / 256GB SSD and decided to do a side by side comparison of a project in Cubase Pro 9 against my 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 2.5GHz / 16GB Ram / 512GB SSD machine…

Well here is what is REALLY sad…

They both performed almost IDENTICALLY!!!

Both seemed to register EXACTLY the same on the Performance meters in Cubase Pro 9…

I run a UR824 and have to be honest I am questioning the performance of the drivers for the UR824…

I bought the UR824 to replace a RME Fireface UFX because I wanted the direct monitoring integration with Cubase (mac doesn’t support asio therefore no asio direct monitoring… CRAP!)…

And I am truly thinking I may have to go back to the RME because its drivers perform SOOOOO much better!!!

But alas this post is about the performance of the iMac vs the MBP and well…

I am not impressed at all…

Is this because Cubase does not utilise the multiple processors properly?

Oh well…

It is not stopping me from working… Just annoying the crap out of me :frowning:

2

Bummer indeed.

I’d be very interested to see the Geekbench scores on both these machines. In particular, the section related to floating-point. Both single and multi-core.

One thing I have noticed over the years is that while overall CPU benchmarks have been soaring, the parts related to floating-point (what most plugins are hungry for), has been relatively flat in comparison.

Because of this, I have a 2006 Mac Pro that is still working great as a plugin effects rack. A small silver lining I guess.

Also, I think it may be possible for Cubase to bottleneck via a single core, under certain use-cases. So you may be right. I really need to benchmark this again (or someone should), to confirm.