The Performance Monitor in Cubase is confusing. I choose to ignore it. If the DAW is working and handling whatever I throw at it…all is well.
One DAW is speaking German, and the other is New York English…in terms of raw physics and math, they are both doing something very similar, and BOTH are really good audio engines for the money…
Compare them with Windows “Resource Monitor”?
Is either DAW sounding bad or breaking your projects?
Can you keep adding stuff to the Cubase project without it sounding bad?
How many CPU cycles an application uses doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t keep doing more work, or that it will stop other processes from doing their ‘real time’ jobs well. Just as an example: Finale uses 40% CPU on my system (pretty much keeping one of 6 cores maxed out anytime the program is playing a score)…with zero plugins, and using an external MIDI instrument, but it works just fine and never misses a beat. I can switch over to VST plugins (or side host them in a 64bit Bidule host) and start stacking voices…40 voices later in something Like ARIA or Halion 5, and it still asks for about 40% of the system resources and rarely more. I can start loading up other applications on the side (a browser, virus scan, encoding a video in the background, etc.) and Finale still chucks right along asking for 40 to 45% of system resources, and my other apps run just fine without noticeable lags or slowdown. Coincidently, Finale is 32bit only…and it performs about the same for me on an old single core Celeron laptop (asking for and using about 40% to 100% of system resources). So…it really doesn’t matter to me anymore as long as things work properly and my work-flow isn’t interrupted.
Streaming doesn’t really need a bunch of CPU cycles…but instead needs bandwidth on the bus, and drivers/hardware that can efficiently seek out and deliver timing sensitive data streams. Cubase can’t control how drivers and devices retrieve data from a device and present it to the OS, and Steinberg cannot rewrite their drivers for them…all it can do is use buffers to estimate issues and get ahead of the process to try to align all the incoming data so it syncs up when converted to analogue by an audio card and sounds right. Sometimes drivers for a hard disk or host controller just have lousy streaming performance…maybe they use massive and very fast ‘burst mode’ chunks of data with interrupts between them…which don’t translate well for real time streaming applications…so, a DAW is forced to ‘work ahead’ and introduce latency while it waits around for the data bursts to come in and be melded together. In addition to whatever disk/host drivers are doing…the DAW also has to contend with the driver(s) for your audio interface…
ALL real time streaming applications must do this. All DAWS…
I suspect that what the performance monitor in Cubase is showing you is buffering activity…just because the buffer is filling up and being used doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in trouble. Keep working until you HEAR a problem…then increase the buffer size and keep working. If your project gets big enough that your buffers are maxed out…then it’s time to either load more samples directly into RAM (increase their preload times if possible), or render some VSTi activity into audio tracks that don’t need to rely on ‘hard drive seeks’.
With all that in mind, I’m curious about what the OSes “Resource Monitor” shows you. Is there really that big of a difference in system resources being used, or raw performance between the two DAWs? Or is it just that the meters built into the DAWs are not trying to measure and display the same stuff? Does it really matter?
Again, DAWs are NOT ‘discrete’ applications free to run ‘as fast as possible with as few cycles as possible’…they rely on clocks and such in your audio interface. A DAW that seems to use a lot of CPU cycles or other system resources doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t take on more jobs without issue.
In windows 10, right click the start button, choose task manager, click the Performance Tab, then click “Open Resource Monitor” at the bottom of the window.
In Windows 7, hit alt-ctrl-del, then choose task manager, then Performance, then Resource Monitor.
As for the Performance Monitor that’s built into Cubase…for me it doesn’t seem to have much if anything to do with system resources or efficiency, but rather, it’s indicating audio buffers filling and emptying as it relates to disk drive activity. If the bottom bar is bouncing around and peaking a lot with a simple one or two track VSTi project (at least in my experience), it’s probably a good time to try some different hard drive(s), or a different hard drive host controller. As for the top bar…I don’t worry about that one unless I’m hearing glitches…then I make the audio interface/ASIO buffer larger.
I notice if no MIDI or VSTi tracks are armed for recording or live monitoring there is very little activity in the Cubase Performance Monitor. The more stuff I have ‘armed’ the more activity I see in that little meter.
Fortunately, any issues I’ve had with Cubase so far (from versions 7 - 8.5) have been resolved by weeding out bad hardware or drivers. I.E. I had a pair of PNY SSD drives that despite benching well and passing brutal latency checks, created glitches in the sound, and spikes in Performance when asked by a DAW to stream data (they were using an interrupt and burst mode that none of my streaming applications like). I stopped trying to stream anything from those drives…and the problem went away. In my case these drives didn’t just mess up with plugins hosted in Cubase…they were also messing up with things hosted in Sibelius, Finale, Bidule, Ableton Lite, and even in their stand alone variants.