Cubase 13: random CPU spikes still here, is maddening

Hi @DrWashington

Please send DMP / IPS to me so that we can investigate.

Pointing out to the CPU spikes. We would be eager to investigate on known issues based on reproducible facts and tangible comparisons. There is a whole chain of entities accountable that can lead to dropouts, the DAW -whichever it is- is far from being the only bottleneck. If one happens to have dropouts with the same project in C13 but not in C12, please inform us and send us the project. If one happens to have dropouts in another DAW than us with a similar project, please inform us and send us the project.

Thank you very much in advance for your invaluable help!

Cheers,
Armand

@Armand - please get back to me. I asked you how to get the folder over to you but youā€™ve not responded. I offered dropbox & mediafire, remember? Iā€™ll adapt to whatever you guys use, though. Just send me a link. Iā€™ve been waiting well over a week.

I just got back from NAMM and Iā€™d love to get this stuff over to you all before my week starts if possible so you can tell me if you recognize something I need to address sooner rather than later.

But, thereā€™s probably very little to send Engineering that they donā€™t already have: I always click the ā€œsend to Steinbergā€ button reflexively.

Actually, you know what? Donā€™t worry about. You all have what you need from me already, Iā€™m sure of it. You donā€™t have the info from the ā€œCubase go poofā€ crashes where nothing new shows up in the folder and the program just suddenly disappears while Iā€™m working, because thereā€™s just no info to be had. But everything send-able Iā€™ve probably already sent. Just tired of this back & forth, man. This is what Iā€™m talking about. Gonna go cram some Ableton for a while. Iā€™m spent.

Hi @DrWashington

Sorry this must have been overlooked at on our side, I wasnā€™t aware you were pending for us to clarify this. Usually DMP / IPS are small enough to be shared directly through the forum, either by posting publicly or sending me a PM. Otherwise I recommend using weshare, or a public dropbox / onedrive / drive link. Bottom line is, we donā€™t want to use credentials to get files.

Cheers,
Armand

Hey Armand, I sent you a few more tonight but a few failed to upload. In any case, hereā€™s a link with lots of 12 & 13 crashes (but there have been many more that didnā€™t appear to create any dump file):

Have spent most of today obsessively trying to figure out why these dropouts are happening so seemingly at random with so little going on. Ableton just doesnā€™t appear to be suffering from this same thing: the meter seems quite stable and only overloads when I hit it really, really hard.

I would be forever grateful if your performance team really took these entreaties to stabilize the audio engine seriously: itā€™s killing me.

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Hi @DrWashington

Thanks for sharing. At this stage I will focus on recent crashes in the latest version of Cubase. I have answered you in the other thread.

Cheers,
Armand

Been running Cubase 7.5 for years on 10+ year old PC (Win7, 8GB RAM) ā€“ rock solid and quiet (I actually started with Cubase on Atari, so a loyal user). Just ā€œupgradedā€ to Cubase 13.0.21 on a new PC (Win 11, 32GB RAM, i9) ā€“ pops and crackles (+ dropouts) like a bowl of rice krispies just looping a GA5 pattern ā€“ totally unacceptable. Even when Audio Perf meter doesnā€™t show any issues.

Yes, Iā€™ve changed buffer size, optimized power settings, turned off background programs, etc. I hope Steinberg is still working on a fix for this ā€“ customers WHO PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THE PRODUCT shouldnā€™t have to be computer programmers to go in and tweak a bunch of workarounds just to make the product work (not to mention disabling security features!). Iā€™m about ready to jump ship and try a different DAWā€¦

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A lot is down to the. Computer. Have you run latencyMon to see if there is something causing this like the video card driver?

In my experience there are at least strong indications that itā€™s very probably down to Cubase: As much as I like to use Cubase I switched back to Reaper at least for recording audio. The exact same configuration (Mac M1 Max, RME interface and the same Plugins) lead to audio spikes in Cubase whereas Reaper shows 5 % CPU usage and about 12 % realtime CPU usage and has never spiked. By the way: Cubase shows average CPU usage in the lower quarter of the range - but it spikes nevertheless from time to time. As I said: I love Cubase for its maturity, wealth of functionality, workflow and user interface, but the audio performance is just lacking at the moment. So from my perspective I would be willing to pay for an update which completely focusses on performance and stability.

Cubase IC remote is another good example: it crashes down on my Ipad M1 pro and my Iphone 12 Pro. The team tells us again and again on the forum that we should restart our devices and the problem should be fixed. They simply donā€™t seam to be willing to accept that this does not correspond to realityā€¦ For Reaper there is a remote controll which is browser based and 100% stable since agesā€¦

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Agreed on a lot of this. Performance does need to be prioritised. Also Iā€™m one of those moaning about icpro as well on my iPhone 14. Works fine on my iPad though.

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Ran LatencyMon and it complained about a few things - these seem to be the worst offenders:
Drivers:
Wdf01000.sys ISR = 2407
ntoskrnl.ext DPC = 4251
afd.sys DPC = 22472
Processes:
nortonsecurity.exe = 52 hard pagefaults
(this is w/Auto-Protect and Firewall disabled, also audio folders are excluded from scanning)

I would get rid of Norton. Itā€™s nearly always been a problem. I just use windows security. I donā€™t go anywhere dodgy or open attachments and my pc is dedicated to Cubase and Wavelab.

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I second this. Norton is awful, always has been, only to be outdone in that department by McAfee.

Ditch it.

Iā€™ve found Cubase 13 runs so much better on Apple silicone with all VST 3 than on a modern windows 11 machine. I have a MBP M1 max with 64GB ram and a 7950x with 64GB ram and the MBP can run the same projects despite it having half the cores and half the CPU GHZ. On the trasl manager you can see thant Cubase isnā€™t using half of the 32 threads my 7950x has whereas the MBP is utilising all 10 and loading very evenly. Thereā€™s something very wrong with the windows performance in Cubase 13.

Reaper runs as smooth as silk and my 7950x shows a huge leap in performance over the MBP as it should, so weā€™d like this from Cubase as well.

As someone said above, performance needs to be addressed on the windows platform as a matter of priority.

M

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who needs norton on a audio pc ? remembering back in 1999 and ever since avoided it, norton was great in the olĀ“ dos times ā€¦ you wont need it - specially for audio

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Ok, my solution in spikes (win11 23, msi x790 ace max, i9 14900k, 64gb ram, rtx 3060 etc.) was:

  • update my rme hdspe madi fx driver / firmware
  • deinstall the nvidia driver and let windows install its nvidia complement.

no spikes since then on c13 ā€¦ 021 . ( a month ago)

yesterday (as a test out of curiousity) i now installed the nvidia studio driver (new install, not update) and not the gaming shite version.
finally,
same thing, no spikes. DPC dumpling at 12 - 120 us

So after all i assume, the update for the rme hdspe madi fx /ad32/da32 was the reason in my audio sysā€¦

Just my 2cts to all of youā€™ z , based on my hardware constellation.

Good luck

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Hi Everyone:

Just adding my 2cents here since i am not seeing anyone talking about this.

Iā€™ve been using Nuendo 12 for almost a year without any kind of of lag, latency or CPU Spikes whatsoever. I didnā€™t even know that random cpu spikes on Nuendo were a thing.

Until last weekā€¦

Since iā€™ve been using it for so long without any issues this puts hardware and bios configuration, tweaking and all of that out of the ecuation. I didnā€™t touch any of that. There were no updates made as far as i know.

What it DID HAPPEN though, is that i had an actual CPU overload on a rehearsal. First time with this guys, running a pretty complex project, 4 monitors turned on, at least 15 plugins running, 3 VST3 Instruments running. Three open projects at a time. You get the deal. CPU was being pushed hard

After that actual CPU Overload, everything went down the toilette. Nuendo 12 started to do his thing with CPU spikes.

I Tried to reboot and shutting down the PC. Nothing. Same behavior

I updated from 12.0.50 to 13.0.21. Nothing

The only thing that helped for a bit was uninstall Nuendo 12 and 13 and run a Nuedo 13 clean installation.

I still have to try to completely uninstall everything Steinberg related.

But i am still gravitating towards some preference and or configuration file that gets messed up after an actual spike.

Iā€™ll keep you posted.

Thanks

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Update

I made a full uninstall by removing every steinberg related folder left behind by the uninstaller, manually deleting every registry record steinberg related. Some of the registry entries couldnā€™t be deleted though.

Nothing happened. At this point iā€™ve tried some of the tweaks shared on this thread and some improvements have been made, but nothing substancial.

I can get my head out of the idea that the software ran pristine for almost a year and after an actual spike i ended up with an expensive un-usable DAW.

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This is truly bizarre. I canā€™t even remember all Iā€™ve done to my system at this point (I really canā€™t: itā€™s been a ton of various tweaks), but right now when at 1024 samples latency on my RME Fireface UFX, things have been pretty smooth sailing of late. Iā€™ll be sure not to breathe on it.

I swear it seems somehow some of this stuff is related to NVIDIA drivers, but I just canā€™t tell how or why. So Iā€™m not touching ANYTHING.

All of it, itā€™s maddening. I am so hoping that this AI revolution leads to software running all the time to spot and address performance problems reliably and far more quickly than any human or group of them ever could. Itā€™s time: weā€™re hitting the age of practical complexity theory in our systems and the attendant breakdowns in predictability. We need something ā€˜aliveā€™, so to speak, that is always acting to counter this entropy and work in our favor and on our behalf: we feed it electricity and it just works, it just makes everything work without random humans all over the Internet constantly having to troubleshoot everything only to have the next crap driver update or something bring it all back to square one.

We need a revolution in how we think about software and we need GPU-driven local agents searching and uploading problems to the cloud when needed for processing 24/7 so that these complex software-hardware systems can self-heal. Time for a whole new paradigm. Well past time, really. If humans can detect that something is wrong, AI can learn to do the same, and that AI can have far, far more insight into the local goings on of the computer than any human can for what I hope should be obvious reasons.

Since you already updated the bios there are 2 main things I would suggest, first use a utility to disable CPU parking (donā€™t remember the name but it is somewhere in the threads) the try to go back one version with your audio driver.
You would not believe how many time I disable core parking only to find out in a few days that it was enabled again, I also had good luck stepping back one version with the UR22mkII driver, Iā€™ve read in other threads that some RME users had similar issues although their drivers are top. Father these two then reinstall the latest version of C13 from the download manager. Good luck.

Have you checked if your Asio guard is accidently turned off?