Cubase 12.0.30 performance issues

Everything is identical in terms of software, but I dont always install everything.

Nothing was running in the background. Ive been tracking this for literally 3 years, across 3 systems, and Ive moved mountains to ensure nothing in my environment was the culprit. I had email conversations with steinberg.de for over a year. I wiped systems repeatedly and stripped everything but bare essentials(30 year net/sysadmin here) just to make sure, and empty cubase projects with 1 instrument would experience it. If you read my earlier posts, you can see I worked around the issue but had to disable BIOS power management and dynamic clocking. Now, I can finally enjoy all the BIOS features and c12 is 100% good. (for now lol)

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Oh well thatā€™s interesting. Whatā€™s your motherboard ?

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lmao I missed that, didnt I. In my haste to rush to the board to list my success story, I forgot the mainboard.

Its a z690 classified from EVGA. Fat board, but was on sale for $299, down from $649.

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Oh yeah, thatā€™s definitely high end ! I have a MSI MEG Z390 ACE, $350 back in the days, now I see the price of newer Z690 has doubled, what the heck :sweat_smile:

Just, does your new build outperform your previous ones in terms of hardware, or did you always have high performance builds ?
Maybe Cubase needs very powerful computers to run properly :grimacing:

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Imho most of these issues come from certain motherboards, as that is what connects all components together. Iā€™d avoid motherboards with a shitload of connectors you donā€™t need and the cheapest ones.

My current computer has a Asrock z370 pro4 (with a 8700K i7, does not cost much at all) and I also have no issues at all.
My next PC will for sure have an asrock motherboard again.

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I believe you are correct. All Iā€™ve asked for from steinberg has been a list of tested hardware that is either free of the hyperthreading/ASIO issue, or the issue is very minimal, but I was never able to get such a list, and that really bothered me. I cant afford to buy 8 different combinations of hardware to figure out which one is the magic combo that works.

I started out with an old EVGA x58 board, moved to a x299 ASRock Taichi, and now the EVGA z690 classified, and ironically this board has the most ā€œbells and whistlesā€ of any motherboard Iā€™ve ever purchased and yet it seems to work perfectly for C12 with all power and clocking options enabled. I fully expected to have to disable all the power and CPU features, including management of the ā€œPā€ and ā€œEā€ cores (I was going to lock all 16 cores to their highest normal speed), but it looks like this system plays very well with C12 + ASIO Guard. Guard is on medium, where it is defaulted. I may turn guard off and see what happens later.

My new build outperforms the old build by a vast amount, and I couldnt be happier. These performance cores regularly hit 5.09ghz at around 70c (I bought a large, dual radiator, dual fan noctua), and itā€™s stunning. I dont overclock, so I really dont ever see single core speeds over 4.00ghz on my other systems. This is the first system Ive ever owned that hit 5.00ghz stock, and can handle it.

Anyone who runs NI Straylight and Pharlight know ā€“ these instruments KILL CPU and cause overloads on many systems. NI admits this, and says its just a massive instrument that causes massive load. My new system handles both without going over 30% CPU!

Edit: argh. Deleted and reposted my comment because I forgot to reply to you, lol.

No problem, the topic is on ā€œtrackingā€ anyway :wink:

I have a i7 9700K (without hyper-threading) and it struggles with some instruments too, like Arturia and Capsule. At 96 kHz with the buffer at 256 some patches canā€™t get past 16 polyphony or it gets overloaded.
Apart from that, I donā€™t have any particular ā€œissueā€, here it is clearly my CPU not being fast enough for these plugins.

Although, a lot of people have been complaining since the release of Cubase 12 that they started experiencing ā€œspikesā€ with the Audio Performance Meter, but honestly, I believe this is just a placebo effect. The Performance Meter has been reworked with Cubase 12 and it now shows instantaneous values, and that made people go crazy because they thought that wasnā€™t normal (itā€™s like comparing True Peak and RMSā€¦). In fact, only a very few users have experienced real performance issues when updating to C12, and most of these issues have been fixed with the maintenance updates. Iā€™m not saying they were all fixed, as some people are still experiencing weird performance issue comparing to C11.

The only way to increase performance is to get a better computer, and your post just proves it.

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Is anyone here having C12 issues on Mac??

After working fine since installing 12.0.30 when it was released C12 has started crashing on startup about 75% of the time.

I have two clues, howeverā€¦
I get an error message saying C12 is having trouble executing ā€˜/private/var/folders/*/NSCreateObjectFilelmageFromMemory-Yd1cUqf5ā€™
and a crash report that names ā€˜com.apple.main-threadā€™ as the thread that crashedā€¦

Iā€™m on a 2021 Macbook Pro M1 Pro running Monterey and running C12 via rosetta translation layer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers :slight_smile:

Thank you! Iā€™ve been trying to figure this out for weeks!

Hi, even when my CPU is at only 25% I am getting terrible stuttering and glitching when using Izotope plugins in Cubase 12.0.30 (and the previous build), under rosetta on an M1 MacBook Air 15gb Ram.

If I disable my Izotope plugins, the glitching goes away. The plugins that cause this are: Tonal Balance 2, Nectar, Unmask, Ozone. I have tried different Asio guard settings and buffer sizes in Cubase, but nothing fixes it. I get lots of Asioguard spikes when using these plugins, even if the single cores are not maxed out.

Even if I run a simple project but put Tonal Balance 2 on the master or control room, stuttering occurs as soon as I try to view the Tonal Balance plugin. So I wonder if the problem is linked to displaying analysis graphs?

BTW this was worse under the previous Cubase 12 build. So Iā€™m glad for the improvement, but its still problematic for me.

I have written to Izotope, and Steingberg technical support.

You are right, when iZotope plugins are opened, the CPU usage increases by a large amount because of the OpenGL bug. Many other plugins do this. As soon as you close their window the CPU usage goes back to normal. And this problem is the same on Windows.

I believe this is an issue with the VST3 code. Apparently this does not seem to be of any concern for Steinberg, as the issue has been present for ages.

Hi Louis, thanks for replying. I have tried switching to VST 2 versions of plugins and got the same behaviour. However, that was once I had already had the stuttering occur, so I might try doing a test with starting with VST 2 to start with.

This is very interesting!
Iā€™m still using an ancient system (see my profile picture in case for a good laugh :slightly_smiling_face:).
I can hardly use any plugins anymore (Fabfilter is very demanding too) so I mostly use hardware.
But plans are here for building one that can last some time.
Is your graphics card EVGA also? Thatā€™s an expensive one!

mbp i7 2019 16" 16g ram
according to cubase 12 I should throw it in the trash, according to c11 this is a very powerful computer ā€¦ think what you want, but c12.0.30 is a total crap in terms of demand for performanceā€¦

MBP 16" 2019 I7 16G ram
The problem i paid for c12.0.30 and iā€™m using c11 because c12 HAS BIG PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS that other daw donā€™t have
Iā€™m not the only one who has these problems anyway.
so how does it work? when you fix c12 will I have to start over with the problems of c12.5?
according to c12 my mac is poop to throw away !!

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Please contact Steinberg Support if youā€™re experiencing performance issues that you havenā€™t been able to solve yourself.

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Donā€™t throw away your computer.Itā€™s CB12 ā€œpro ā€œ you should get rid of instead. It canā€™t handle anything beside itself. It canā€™t even handle playing along at channel 11 with a 10 channel imported audio session or handle a DAW screen recording without also generating crack,pop,glitches and other artefacts in its output. Have tried all buffer sizes between 1024 to 64. Itā€™s not latency! Itā€™s not VST or graphics, IT IS JUST CB12 ! Realise that ,and maybe we can make Steinberg listen. Cubase is about audio right?
My Ableton, Native Instrument even Cubasis (i os) and CB 11 pro on my MacBook Pro 2014 8Gb ram makes the job above without issues.
So I just cut the lossā€™es for the cost for the CB12 upgrade and keep on audioing without supercomputers like some ivā€™e read about here.

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Guys at STEINBERG.

Kindly, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEAAAAASSEEEEE, take more time to release updates.

Please concentrate in testing the program to 100 different computers before asking people to part with their cash.

Your loyal customers (like me) will appreciate absence of the ā€œmost amazing Cubase yetā€ for years if need be , to get ā€œThe Most Amazing Cubase Yetā€ that works for pretty much everybody!

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Well considering theyā€™ve probably sold 10ā€™s of thousands of licenses for C12 (through upgrades, new users, etc) and we donā€™t have 10000 threads about bad performance, I think its safe to say they did do a good job testingā€¦ Out of all the user base, weā€™ve got a ā€˜handfulā€™ of folks with issues related to their particular setups and systems, the rest of the masses are getting on just fine with it. There is no way to test every single user scenario, but they seem to do a good job with most of them.

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