Cubase 11.0.41 - Unexplained Spikes

[somecomposer]

Hi everybody, I was hoping for some help.
I am on Windows 10, and Cubase 11.0.41

I am running heavy projects, Cubase works fine up to a point.

All is well, although performance is pushed a bit, by no means there is a problem.

near the completion of work, it all goes to hell…I have a fresh installation of windows, just in case I need it, but my secondary drive has failed and I can’t clone a fresh copy to reset everything (this works for me).

I need to get to the bottom of this , any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have pops and crackles which render any work impossible.

As I said, one minute the program works great and without adding anything, it suddenly becomes unusable,

The problem appears unexpectedly, when the session works fine. Out of nowhere, the performance is so bad that the session, as I said, is impossible to work with.

Also, something weird happens:

When I chose a channel, say Violins 1 from Hollywood Strings, the spikes were crazy and could not play back.

When I choose a group channel or a deactivated channel the performance indicator quietens down and I can play back fine.

How can this be?

If Cubase has a problem with performance, surely it should be all the time.
Not only when I chose an instrument channel…

Please have a look at this short video, the group channel when highlighted poses no issues, the minute I chose the Bass (Majestica) channel, it all goes to hell…

Specs:

Processor (CPU)	Intel® Core™ i9 18 Core Processor i9-10980XE (3.0GHz) 24.75MB Cache
Motherboard	ASUS® PRIME X299-A II: ATX, USB 3.2, SATA 6 GB/s, ARGB Ready
Memory (RAM)	64GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 32GB)
Graphics Card	1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE 710 - DVI, HDMI, VGA

Using M.2 Card for the operating system, and a separate M.2 card for the sessions and sounds, East West sounds are running from a separate SSD (not M.2).

With thanks
PS, the video is of very bad quality, but please note that the yellow channel is the Group channel and the red channel is the instrument channel, you can clearly see the performance going down to normal when the Group channel is selected.

[Nico5]

I suspect ASIO Guard is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your project by implicitly making large buffer sizes for most tracks.

But when you select a channel and it automatically enables record and monitoring for that channel, Cubase sets that channel and its chain to the presumably much smaller buffer sizes you manually selected (rather than the large buffers for ASIO guard). It does that, so you get low latency while practicing or recording through that track and its audio chain.

So if the selected channel and its subsequent audio chain is high latency and/or CPU intense you get this overload behaviour.

If the selected channel and its audio chain is of low latency and CPU consumption, there’s no overload.

If you disable ASIO guard, your project will likely be in permanent audio overload, regardless of selected channel.

At least that’s the way I think it works. If that’s mistaken, I’m pretty sure someone will correct me.

[somecomposer]

Thank you so much, I omitted to say that the guard is on, steinberg power scheme is on, audio priority is high.

The pc’s power settings are maxed out, including the advanced settings.

The other thing I also omitted to say is that the buffer size is set reletavely low.

I will max it out and see if I will have any results.

[somecomposer]

I maxed out the buffer size, deleted preferences, I re-engaged Steinberg Power Scheme and seems that things have calmed down, many thanks for your help!