Hi,
I also get very high real-time-peaks when pushing the “monitor”- or “record”-button on midi-tracks and also when opening any midi-editor-window (as long as this window is the active window). But only on midi-tracks related to Kontakt 5.
Turning Kontakt off: no peaks.
Does not really help - but try it.
Grüße
grello
Turning off the “ARM” button before trying to load the first instrument does not help, although it does seem that the load gets farther along before failing. – got up to 0.92 Gb on a 1.25 Gb instrument. Again, plenty of memory, 64 bit system. Standalone can keep loading instruments until I get bored … haven’t yet found a limit.
Still waiting for the moderators to approve first posts. Meanwhile, another idea: both the original poster and I have had Sonar X3 installed … is it possible some driver or vst thing (?) from sonar is conflicting with cubase? A competitive spike-the-other-program?
Does anyone think it would help to just buy the fastest thing on the market and reload? I am considering the new Has well processor (Intel 5960), 32 gigs of ddr4 ram and an Asus Rampage motherboard. This will all set me back around $2200 but I am desperate… I really don’t want to leave Cubase.
honestly i had a less than stellar win 8 reinstall recently. before giving up completly i would suggest to try a reinstall. I have found win 8 to be more finicky to setup than 7… dont know why. i am really looking forward to win x. a win 7 instal is a good choice, also.
make sure you cpu when no programs open is under five percent… all the regular tuning stuff.
after some two weeks of tweaking i finally got 8 to perform better but i still dont think its as good and stable as 7 is.
gl…
oh and i also suggest you dont need the absolute top end cpu, just the i7 affordable should be fine.
there are also so.many other factors at play.
I can’t make it out in your video but is the Kontakt CPU meter also pegged?
I’m curious to know if Kontakt is actually doing work but I couldn’t make out it’s cpu reading in the video.
In terms of a reload, rather than removing everything I would suggest creating a small drive partition on your primary hard disk and clean installing Windows, Cubase, ASIO drivers and Kontakt on that. You can shrink your existing partition to make room for the new partition. You can then dual boot into the “clean” version and repeat the experiment without disrupting your existing setup.
MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP YOUR PC FIRST!!
If the small clean install works it would eliminate any hardware issues and tell you if you have a software conflict and if a reload is worthwhile.
Cheers
Rob
I do believe the problem is as I’ve described (in my most recent post, above).
If so, it’s possible that an i7-5960X could make matters worse. More cores could mean slightly less performance and base-clock frequency per core.
I think the Record Enabled buffer has to be processed on one core (it can’t scale to the other cores).
A response from Steinberg to confirm this would be greatly appreciated.
You might submit a support request and reference my thoughts on the matter (if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong).
The only way to know for sure, is to test.
That said, I do think certain parts of the Geekbench score might reveal the answer. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of this.
If I have time, I’ll take a peek at the 5960X’s posted Geekbench scores online and see if I can make a guess as to how much better (or worse) a single core on it might be.
The only other factor I can think of that may allow the 8-core to help you, is if other real-time effects, at the time of record (elsewhere in Cubase) that would have shared the “Record Enabled” core (and stealing from it), happen to get moved to one of those two extra cores the 5960X has. If so, it could be just enough to help.
But there is no way to know this and frankly, that’s a terrible strategy as it could change from reboot to reboot.
Sigh, it’s complicated.
Btw, how large the Kontakt patch is, shouldn’t matter much. Only the voice / polyphony count and real-time effects on that patch (preset) should matter.
You might try removing any Kontakt-based effects on the preset (if there are any) and move it to a group buss or send in Cubase. This might move that workload to a different CPU core and free up just enough to prevent the spiking.
Btw, I have a gut feeling that a cheaper, 4 core (but running at a higher clock, per core) would solve this issue for you. But at the cost of possible lower, overall performance for general mix duty (the larger ASIO buffer related stuff that CAN make use of all cores, for sure).
I’d try a latency monitor program and make sure you aren’t getting spikes. I recently started getting poorer asio performance and it turned out that the latest Intel nic drivers were causing it. I rolled back to the previous version and the spikes disappeared.
As some have already pointed out, record enabling or monitoring disables the ASIO guard buffer so you can play/record without the additional latency. What is your actual buffer setting ? 128 samples ?
Presumably, tuning ASIO Guard off will disable the dual buffer setup, and put everything on an equal basis?
If so, if what you write is true, the issue should disappear. Of course, capacity might be reduced.
For Win 8.x, the old dpclat.exe does not work, so use LatencyMon. Even though it is not as simple as dpclat, it gives a lot more indication of what is creating latencies.
+1 on the last post.
My motherboard has 6 additional USB-3 ports, realized using a VIA controller, that really messed up my daw after an driver update. LatencyMon was really helpful finding the culprit.
True. Good point. It’s worth a try!
It seems like the results of this test would:
a) support my hypothesis, if it works.
b) refute it, if it doesn’t AND there is plenty of ASIO performance left.
c) be inconclusive if it doesn’t work and turning ASIO Guard off overloads the audio engine (or is very near being overloaded).
Easy to test and the results should be interesting.
Did the driver update set the power-down settings on the individual ports to checked? I find that they will change when what’s plugged in changes as well.
Could be I didn’t check, it was more like the USB ports got so much priority that it went to the top in LantencyMon Then I just went back to previous driver and all was normal again. My next motherboard will be without any additional controller chips that’s for sure.
Please put your details in your signature, as it is getting hard to keep track of your setup across multiple pages.
See page 1053 of the Editing - Project & MixConsole sub-section of the Editing section of the Preferences chapter of the Operation Manual for the default record enabling options:
To change them, select File > Preferences to open the Preferences dialog, then the Editing/Project & MixConsole option to show the Project & Mix Console panel.
Snapshot for your viewing pleasure, sir!
Are the Cpu and Disk meters showing any activity?
Jalcide, I don’t think your last reply (or one before last … didn’t see the last last) will be of help. I have similar set up, similar problems, and it’s not from heat or insufficient memory or core usage. If the moderators ever let me post a message (waiting 25 hours so far) maybe you’ll see this, bigboi. Asioguard on or off doesn’t change things, core usage in Kontakt doesn’t change things, arm or not arm on track doesn’t change things.
edit and by the way I went the whole path to reinstall windows, install cubase 8 first, update cubase 8, install kontakt 5, update kontakt 5, update the RME HDPSe AIO sound card with latest drivers. Nothing else on system at all.
After struggling with no reply from steinberg technical support and no posts allowed on the forum (grrr again) at least I have a work-around now:
Requires an audio set up that can handle loopback, and a ‘virtual midi’ port (look up “loopMIDI”, it seems to work smoothly for me).
Fire up one or more loopMIDI ports. Start Kontakt in stand-alone mode, set the virtual midi ports as one or more inputs. Load instruments to your hearts content, no limit that I’ve found so far except total memory. Start cubase, and set up an audio input from your audio loopback and midi tracks that use the virtual midi as outputs. Drive the Kontakt setup with your midi data, record the audio output into Cubase and do with that whatever else you need to do.
Oh and one more thing for those trying to duplicate the problem: the instrument load has to be pretty big relative to some of the older Kontakt instruments like those in the libraries from NI. I used the embertone violin full patch to cause the problems, it takes about 1.3 Gb by itself (and caused the VST setup to fail …)
Thanks you VERY much for that video link. My C8 performance is definitely a little better now after performing all those tweaks. 