Cubase 13 vs Cubase 11 CPU capacity (50% fall in processing power)

Cubase
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1

I was aware of reports of poor CPU usage in Cubase, so decided to test this myself as I’m usually a ‘get on with it’ guy with plenty of composing to do, but have found performance limitations quite stifling recently.

BUG:
Using the DAWBench DSP test (from 2017) I tested performance and found that CPU usage in Cubase 13 is completely ignoring 8 physical CPUs, leading to approximately 50% lower performance.

I opened up the DSP test file in Cubase 11 and found I was able to go from 196 plugins, to 384 plugins, approximately double the peformance of C13.

CPU readings show that 8 physical cores are idle / ignored for processing. ASIOguard is off in both settings, and performance settings are largely identical.

The system is an audio optimised HP Z workstation and has been stable for years. Losing 50% capacity with a software update from C11-C13 is a major setback. Is there something I’m missing here?

Pics as evidence :

Cubase 11
Cubase 111920×1080 255 KB

Cubase 13
Cubase 131920×1080 239 KB

1 Like
2

Interesting. I’ll be following this.

3

Absolutely,me too

4

what happens when you switch ASIO guard on?

Does anyone work without ASIO guard these days?

I can’t see any advantage in doing so.

M

5

Good question - the test was designed to be equal, so both have it switched off. I imagine the results would be similar if they were both on - it certainly wouldn’t double the performance.

Test setup is a dual Xeon - I wonder if the process tweaks in Cubase 13 code which are designed to help the latest gen Intel CPUs have inadvertantly stymied the existing ones?

6

definitely something squirely going on under the hood since V11 I agree and TBH I’m not sure what’s happening but I’ve a feeling it’s to do with the newer CPU’s with E and P cores. I have an AMD 7950x which doesn’t have e and P cores and I’m seing very poor performance , by that I mean my MBP which only has 10 cores @ 3,2 GHZ performs as well as a 16/32 core machine @ 5.6GHZ with twice the power. That shouldn’t be the case if the windowsd thread scheduling was working properly in Cubase.
Edit: I’ve just tried turning ASIO guard on and off in Cubase 11 and with it off it doesn’t thread to half the cores like your example but engaging ASIO guard spreads the load actually quite well across all my 32 threads.

M

7

I guess that is the cause as per the picture cubase 13 seems to ber running on 1 cpu only. So don’t expect any reasonable answers from people running 1 cpu. You could maybe edit the thread title to

Cubase 13 only using one cpu in dual cpu setups?

8

I did my tests too, performance dropped from C11 to C12 and from C12 to C13

9

Further to this, I’ve followed some AVID Pro Tools setup guidelines and turned on Hyperthreading (so 16C/32T) and the performance has improved from :

HT ON: 98 TRACKS CUBASE 11
HT OFF : 81 TRACKS CUBASE 11

HT ON: 71 TRACKS CUBASE 13
HT OFF : 40 TRACKS CUBASE 13

So, an improvement, but still ~30% down on the previous audio engine.

Admins - should I enable C-states? Anything else, that I had previously been advised to turn off?

Windows 10.

Thanks

Tom