I have found that mixdown on the Mac is incredibly slow. From monitoring memory usage, it appears that Cubase loads the whole project in again before it does the mixdown. In my case, this exhausts physical memory and starts using virtual and thus gets really slow. It takes 10 or 15 minutes to actually start a mixdown no matter how small. On top of that, it appears that Cubase does not release the extra memory after the mixdown. At least, the virtual memory is still shown as in use. This renders mixdown unusable for me except for a final mix. Is there any way to get audio tracks from virtual instruments? Some little piece of software that echos back the audio out as an audio device or something.
That sounds like something is terribly wrong in your system, definately no intented behaviour.
To answer your question: yes, you can bypass exporting by just recording the stuff to a simple audio track. To do so, you have to route the signals to a group, which is then shown as a possible input for any audio track (the main out isn’t available there).
Thanks. That does work. I have to be careful about clipping this way, though. I don’t think there is a problem with my system but it might be a problem with this project. It crashes if I load it first. I have to load another project first to get it to work. This has been a recurring problem throughout. I got tired of having to use a backup and lose work and I found this trick.
ahahah when a OSX user have problems in this forum, someone with windows reply “something is wrong in your system” ahahahahaha is too funny 
Well, it just sounds wrong, doesn’t it? 
If you use 32 bit float, clipping is not an issue. Fixed 24 bit files will clip when exceeding 0 dbFS, so will your interface outputs, but not the internal processing/bouncing/recording groups when using 32 bit FP.
Here is a simple test somebody could do on a Mac as I have seen where people said it took much longer to mixdown on a Mac than on a Windows system. Open the activity monitor and note how much memory is being used. Then do a mixdown and see if the memory usage increases by about the project size.