A while ago I ran my PC as a fully working Hackintosh and was able to try Nuendo on both the PC and Mac side on an equal system.
The performance on the PC side was in general much superior to the Mac.
Cpu-wise I think about 20% faster, but the most noticeable difference was graphically. On my regular orchestral template which has about 300+ midi tracks, around 20 group tracks and around 12-20 audio tracks the difference was staggering.
On the PC side the session is still very manageable and scrolling up and down and generally moving around the session is reasonably smooth. On playback this movement becomes a bit more sluggish.
Moving parts and audio around however is still reasonably fast and editing in general is fast enough to allow a reasonably fast workflow.
On the Mac side however the exact same session is much, much slower. Moving around when not playing is sluggish, and moving parts around takes much longer as the screen update is significantly slower. On playback it becomes unbearably slow and barely workable.
In general I found it much harder to work on the same session on the mac as the screen updates were that much slower, really impacting my workflow.
Funnily enough, though the mac side is also a bit slower on the cpu side (i.e about 20% less performance audio-wise then its PC counterpart on a 512 buffer setting on an RME FF800), the impact wasn’t significant enough to really be a problem.
But the visual side really was, and I ended up changing back to the PC to get the better performance.
A real shame as in general I much prefer the Mac user experience; it is much cleaner, more consistent and pleasing to look at and due to the always present menu bar at the top and slimmer windows you actually get a bit of extra screenspace too compared to the PC.
Things like mission control also make switching between apps much easier.
Nuendo’s age is showing a bit though as some of the UI elements look really out of place on the mac…it does feel like a port rather then a native mac app.
So the question is; is there likely to be an improvement on the visual update of Nuendo in the future, to bring it up to par with its PC counterpart?
Errr … have you ever tried to modify the standard Windows look to narrower head-, menu- and scroll bars? In my experience Windows’ GUI can be set to be much less obtrusive than OSX’.
IMHO the prob is not with Nuendo but with Apple.
Cubase is a much ‘zippier’ product on PC and
especially true when it comes to graphics.
We here are researching getting a couple of the new Mac pros
when they ship hoping for much better graphics performance
but then again this is Apple. Who knows?
Dietz, I have messed with those options before but like to keep aero on as there is much less visual tearing when moving windows etc. around as it is for the most part GPU accelerated.
Curteye; I tested it on the same system on both mac and pc with the same graphics card; if an app is much snappier on one OS than the other then imho it boils down to two things, which are not hardware/graphics card related:
-the speed of the OS
-the speed of the application
Mac Os uses afaik triple buffering on the display of windows etc, meaning that there will rarely if ever be any visual tearing when you for example resize a window.
Aero on Windows uses (I think) double buffering (mild tearing) and none on the non-Aero setting, so you get a lot of visual tearing when you resize windows or drag them around.
Obviously triple buffering will be slower, but this should not affect the application speed itself so much.
I heard once that Nuendo/Cubase on the Mac runs on a codebase that isn’t native to the Mac but runs a level of emulation, so that the app can be developed on windows but run (with tweaks) on the mac as well.
Could be wrong, but it would explain why it is significantly slower on the mac than on the pc.
in the upcoming updates we will put a focus on performance improvements in general (not specifically on the graphics side, but the overall application behaviour). From what I have seen over the years, traditionally MAC required more “power” to achieve a similar performance compared to PC. However, nowadays the difference shoudln’t be so significant that it actually hinders you doing your daily work.
The number of Nuendo MAC users has been increased by more than 30% in the past 5-6 years, which I believe is a sign that the PC/MAC performance difference shouldn’t be that crucial.
For me the performance increase of Nuendo 6 with ASIO guard vs. Nuendo 5 means that I can now run 3 ms buffers for all my sessions all the time, so I don’t need to switch to 12 ms anymore. This is a huge plus. I run hecacore mac pros with Nuendo sessions that include quite a bit of plugs. To be quite honest I don’t care about the performance of the GUI too much.