I think I’ve been one of the most repetitive guys in this forum about the performance of cubase on mac. I was ready to sell my intel i9 laptop to buy a new m1, but I’ve just installed cubase 12, just opened a pair of projects, and I’m absolutely amazed. Projects where my cpu was reaching it’s maximum and it didn’t let me insert a single vst more, now I see with cubase 12 the cpu meter is around half of it. Hope this keeps on and it doesn’t suddenly start failing again.
For the time being, my biggest congratulations to the Steinberg team (hats off).
Taking a couple of projects to it’s maximum, full load of plugins (almost the majority of them in the mixbus and master channels) , now cubase 11, surprisingly, seems to perform a little bit better. Where 12 stops playing, cubase 11 still plays it even though it does it with some drop outs.
I have no … idea of what could happen yesterday when I tested 12 for the first time, but now I realise it was just an illusion and nothing has changed in the cpu management aspect in Cubase.
That’s strange.
I tested again and what made a big difference was ASIO-Guard. Turning it on or off doesn’t yield the same performance hit.
I’m not working with very big projects generally, but I still don’t know what to think about ASIO-Guard.
Should it better be deactivated for tracking and re-enabled for mixing or should I leave it on all the time?
On 11 I always have audio drop-outs when loading a new project and playing it for the first time, no matter the size.
From the second time on it plays fine (a buffer thing?) …
I’m on W10 Pro, Roland Octa-Capture @128 Samples buffer size. This is the “Pop Demo Austin Hull MIXED” with 79 tracks, around 160 FX (plenty of Reverbs), & 21 VSTi’s:
Id recommend to always set it to “ON”. I just noticed, that on C12 its setting from LOW to HIGH is a bit messed up. Definitely better performance on LOW now, whereas before it was better on HIGH.