Tell me what is wrong with Cubase 15 Pro performance? Look below - same PC, same exact session performance meter from Cubase 15 Pro vs Cubase 14 Pro. In Cubase 15 Pro drop outs all the time, asio guard high as hell - totally unworkable. In Cubase 14 Pro all is perfect and works smooth without single drop out. What’s going on??? The difference is HUGE! My PC - Dell Precision, Win 11 Pro, Intel i7 12700H, 64GB RAM.
Cubase 15 Pro:
Cubase 14 Pro:
I can’t comment on what’s going on with your machine but, as a comparison, resource usage of my benchmark projects on C14 and C15 looks virtually indentical. No better and no worse.
Win11 25H2
i7 14700K
64GB RAM
I had a similar effect some years ago with Defender Antivirus, I usually exclude the Cubase executable from the realtime scanner, but forgot to add the new version, the result was similarly unusable until I added the new Cubase executable to the list of exclusions, too.
Also, just to be sure, you are comparing the exact same project, and made sure that no track was record armed in both tests (or have the exact same number of tracks record armed when comparing), and if you use Control room and have plugins there, they are the same…
This, plus you’ve got nothing different running in the background.
How exaclty you do it? Never thought about it. How to exclude Cubase exe from realtime scan?
Never mind. Got it. I will try to exclude Cubase exe from Defender and my other antivirus realtime scan.
Alternatively, just exclude your folders for sample libraries and Cubase projects from the realtime scan. This should generally enough and there is no dependency to the Cubase version.
You’re my Forum Hero! I’ve excluded Cubase exe file and the whole Cubase folder (as well as my projects’ folder) from real time scanning in my anti-virus software - and so far so good. After some heavy tests - all good. Thank you my man for this suggestion!
Hi - what anti virus software do you use?
ESET.
But it wasn’t the issue. Drop-outs and Asio guard peaks are back. Also in Cubase 14 Pro… I really don’t know what has happend. All was fine - and for a week or two it started happening. Just like that. It is absolutely frustrating. Cubase is my main DAW for years - but now I am unable to work on it. Tried all the tips and suggestions I found on this forum. Nothing helped.
Maybe last Windows updates, or any other software updates or hardware drivers update caused some interactions with Cubase. Don’t know.
have you checked with latencymon if it is some maybe some windows driver causing an issue?
I will check. Thx.
That doesn’t look good. No wonder if you are experiencing dropouts…
Check the power management scheme you are on. Do you have “Activate Steinberg PowerScheme” enabled in Studio Setup/Audio System. That should be the minimum.
Also, please provide a screen shot of the “Drivers” tab in LatencyMon.
Seems like Dell + high latency in ACPI.sys are a bit of an ongoing topic, at least there are several search results over the years…Some claim it was “Dell Support Assist”, whatever that is, so maybe disabling that could be worth a try.
I did try different PowerSchemes including Steinberg PowerScheme. No big difference. Today I have found and performed some system tweaks to make the power plan used for Cubase the best possible.
What helped me today (at least I can work with Cubase 15 without drop outs all the time) is the tip I found somewhere to exclude E cores (8 in my case) for Cubase process CPU affinity and leave it only on P cores (6 in my case). So I did - I changed it in Process Lasso. And the difference is significant.
Here is the Drivers tab:
Thanks, I will try.
The improvement could be that the offending drivers (acpi.sys and wdf0100.sys) are now running on the E cores and don’t interfere with Cubase any more. This doesn’t seem to be a guaranteed stable solution, though:
“One way is to use process lasso, to set affinity for your DAW by setting it not to use CPU core where ACPI.sys occurs to work - when you’ll use LatencyMon, and select the CPUs tabn you’ll see which cores are used by ACPI.sys, and then exclude usage of those cores by your DAW .. But, sometimes it happens for me that ACPI.sys is using only one core, sometimes two, sometimes three .. so this is not the way for me.”
AI had the following suggestions:
CPU Core Affinity: Assign audio-related interrupts (Sound, Realtek, Intel Smart Sound) to one set of CPU cores, and ACPI/Power management interrupts to a different set using tools like the Microsoft Interrupt Affinity Tool.
Power Settings: Switch to High Performance or Ultimate Performance plans, set the Minimum processor state to 100%, and disable USB selective suspend and Link State Power Management.
BIOS Adjustments: Disable C-States or Intel SpeedStep in the BIOS/UEFI to prevent power state transitions that trigger high-latency interrupts.
Driver Management: Update chipset, audio, and network drivers directly from Dell’s support page for your specific model. Temporarily disabling Dell SupportAssist and non-essential antivirus software has been reported to improve latency in some cases.
Process Lasso Workaround: Use Process Lasso to set CPU affinity for your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to exclude cores where ACPI.sys is actively running, though this can be unstable if ACPI.sys shifts cores.
Not sure if they are all valid, though. If you try them, only one after another and be sure that you know how to roll back the change.
