f you use the external monitor, you can easily see that Cubase never uses more than 10-20% of your system’s cpu core"
What rot
I have a test project that gets into the low 90s on all cores
I use it as a system health check after hardware and software changes, having never needed that much in real life work.
Hippo
When I worked under Windows, Cubase used to perform much better, not as good as your picture shows but quite nice, but since I’ve switched to mac, the cpu management is calamitous.
I’ve always been a real cubase backer, but I’m starting to think switching to other daws could not be a bad idea.
I post this link to my test project
Its not meant to be a be all and end all but on every PC and cubase 10.5 set up I`ve tried (7 so far) its possible to get to near or above 90% on all cores including hyperthreaded ones.
This is with all sorts of aiso interfaces only the buffer size needed to change to get the 90% result
Its for reference only probably full of technical holes not meant to be real world project example but may settle some multi-core questions like is it cubase or my setup thats not using my cpu fully
Hippo
Apples plan is quite clear, they want to move users to ipad. Guess you not only need to find a other DAW, you need a new OS for it too.
I can’t see any answers as to why their HT cores aren’t being utilised? I’ve used Cubase on Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, and iMac plus 2x Win 10 machines (4 core i7 &6 core i7) and never seen it fail to utilise threads.
To the OP - Have you tried disabling ASIO Guard and enabling it again? I was under the presumption that once you have that enabled then threads/virtual cores will be used.
…Or is this a known specific issue with 8 core Macs?
I will try it and let you know the results !
Reminder: this issue is NOT a unique issue effecting very few people, which is how the issue is described by many… well-intended “helpers” who come make those claims when new users report it.
Disabling all virtual cores is the workaround, and this needs to be documented clearly for the hardware profiles that suffer the issue.
Hippo I noticed you are using 32 bit processing.
Did you by any chance test the performance when you change the setting form 32 bit to 64 bit processing?
Actually, you bought a MacBook with 8 cores. Then you have 8 additional hyperthreaded/fake cores.
On Windows though, Cubase does seem to use the Hyperthreaded cores. On mac though, I’m not sure why it’s not using them. So you are probably onto something.
You probably don’t want to do this but if you really wanted to, you could dual boot Windows on your mac, install Cubase and your plugins and see if you get a performance boost. However, I don’t think this will work because the i9 thermal throttles on Windows on mac. It used to do it on MacOS also but they decided to run the cpu at unsafe temperatures via a software update of the MacOS after people started complaining however the hack was just at software level in the OS and if you run Windows on the same MacBook, the cpu will thermal throttle to more safer levels to protect itself but will then be effectively running slower.
So, if it makes you feel better. Even if Cubase is not running as efficient on Mac, putting Windows on your MacBook will probably result in Cubase running slower anyway as your cpu will thermal throttle sooner/correctly.
Thanks a lot for your explanation !
Regards from Spain.
Thanks a lot for your post. It’s been really helpful.
OSX scheduler does not put task on the second HT cpu until all normal core are fully loaded.
I think this should be read by anyone in this thread. And yes, Vin Curigliano knows what he’s writing about.
There has been lots of misinformation at the begining of this thread. Let’s rectify some basic facts here :
1- Hyperthreading is a feature of Intel’s CPU platform. Hyperthreading effectively creates logical cores that do not exist as physical cores inside the CPU. Therefore when HT is activated the OS sees, and the OS scheduler can play with, double the count of logical cores than the amount of physical cores on the CPU ;
2- considering the same heavily multi-threaded computational scenario an identical hardware core frequency and core IPC, we know that 8 logical cores out of 8 physical cores CPU will always perform much better than 8 logical cores out of 4 hardware cores CPU Hyperthreaded to a total of 8 logical cores ; moreover, the 4 physical core CPU will almost always perform better with HT activated (8 logical cores) compared to HT disabled (4 logical cores). The exceptions to this general rule are the very old, early generations of Intel’s HT implementations and Windows scheduler implementations (prior to Win 7). Of course the gain from HT (10-15% typical) is of course much less compared to doubling the physical core count on the CPU (duh!) ;
3- different OS thread scheduler implementations will react differently to an app’s dynamic usage of multiple threads; Microsoft’s scheduler is one thing, Apple’s is another;
4- applications are not programmed to “use” or “not use” Hyperthreading ; the OS sees the amount of logical cores that the CPU provides it with, and apps are going to be provided with CPU time on said logical cores according to how the OS’ scheduler schedules the entire pool of threads, of course up to the limit of threads that each app can internally use. In other words those apps that are still single-threaded are still going to use a single thread on a single logical core on a single physical core, apps that can only deal with 4 threads will still use 4 threads, etc. ;
5- a higher count of physical cores, and to a lesser, but still significative extent, a higher count of logical cores due to HT, will both improve computational performance in a multithread scenario, as a whole at the OS level ;
6- HT has been shown before to improve multi-threading in DAW benchmarks.
For my situation…
I’m currently running Cubase Pro 10.5.30 on Mc with OS 10.13.6. The Mac currently is 4-core with 32GB of RAM. I’m upgrading processors and RAM to this; 12-core processor with 64GB RAM.
Is this upgrade compatible with Cubase Pro 10.5.30? Including multicore usage.
ASIO on or off? If on, 64bit or 32 bit?
Thanks in advance
