It’s been a week, did you try to uninstall/re-install Cubase?
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What I had in mind was a fresh new boot drive/partition, don’t touch what you have now…keep what you have now so you can boot right back to that in an uncorrupted state.
On the fresh drive start with square one, nothing but the factory installs on a fresh OS, and with just one monitor at first.
If that works, great, gradually install things in spare time until finding what breaks it. If it doesn’t work, gradually ‘take things away or make tweaks’ at the BIOS/OS/Driver levels.
The bulk of large library files can be run off any drive/partition at any time. You wouldn’t necessarily need to redownload all of that. You might have to move a few of your license keys (ilok and such that are kept on disk instead of a dongle).
I guess sharing a dxdiag log is out of the question? It might be barking at the wind, but then again some forum member might browse it and see something in there that’s a pretty quick and easy fix.
A dxdiag scan should provide a pretty complete list of your system build, what drivers are in play, what CPU and GPU features are enabled, etc…
When I re-install everything (which I do on a regular 12-18 month basis) I never have to re-install my libraries. Just point Kontakt, whatever, to their location. This is why we don’t keep them on the boot partition.
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Do you have your sample libraries stored on your system drive?
If yes, you should consider moving them to a different drive for multiple reasons.
If no, then it is not a factor in the case you need to wipe your system drive and reinstall your OS and applications from scratch.
A “fresh start” is sometimes inevitable. A little bit of planning ahead will make this ordeal less painful. Consider creating an image backup of your system drive in a few different “states”.
I like to have at least two image backups of my system drive. One made just after the OS has been installed and updated and another made after all my essential applications and plugins have been installed.
Yes, I had a busy week so I couldn’t post before, and I still didn’t get a chance to get back to Steinberg support, who asked me to test this problem with different connections, like if it happens with one monitor connected, then two, then three and so on.
I tested this before uninstalling everything Steinberg, same thing, no matter how many monitors were connected, as in, really connected with cables, not just turned off, because the protocols for that are total anarchy as most things in the electronics world, so some brands program their monitors to tell the computer that the monitor is off when it’s turned off, and some tell the computer it’s on regardless of whether they are or not.
After that, I uninstalled not just Cubase but everything Steinberg, so Nuendo 13, Wavelab Pro 12, Spectralayers Pro 11 and instruments. I used Agent Ransack to do a real search for any folders left behind, and finally I went into the registry and deleted most instances of Steinberg, Cubase, etc.
After a reboot or two, I installed Nuendo 13 first, to go in a more chronological order, and tested it for this bug. It didn’t happen right away, and I was starting to think that it wouldn’t happen at all, but eventually it did. It wasn’t the worst, like those screenshots I posted that show the GUI almost completely white and other craziness.
Same thing with Cubase Pro 14. To do a more accurate test, this time I didn’t import the preferences file or the key commands file, which I had brought in from my Mac installation of Cubase back in January.
And just as with Nuendo, Cubase was perfect at the beginning, but eventually it started to show the giant key editor window when it was detached from maximized. While I didn’t see anything crazier than that, like all the visual chaos in previous posts, sadly I haven’t had a chance to use Cubase Pro 14 this week, and for what I remember, those bad glitches don’t show right away, but after working for a while. That’s why I haven’t sent my results to Steinberg support yet, I was waiting for a chance to work longer in Cubase and see what happened.
What’s clear to me is that this is a bug in Cubase and Nuendo.
I only keep some on the boot disk because of space. And to me relinking doesn’t always work. It works fine with some libraries, but not for others. Plus, it’s not like I have the Steinberg software and virtual libraries, I have a lot of other software that would still make me waste a lot of time re-installing, so unless there’s a very good reason, I’m just not going to do that.
Yeah, well, still very time consuming, and for me to do that, my Windows installation would have to be a very corrupt state that caused me lots of problems with almost every piece of software I have. That’s just not the case. Other than Cubase and Nuendo (the latter I hardly ever use), my system is very stable.
Besides, my motherboard has slots for 5 NVMes, of which 4 are taken by the current drives, because if I put one in the fifth slot it would share the PCIe lane with the graphics card. So 4 is the limit for internal drives, unless I start adding SATA SSDs, but I’m fine with the 4 I have, and if I need extra space, I just connect one of the external USB 3 SSDs.
Some of them, yes. Part of that is a matter of speed. No matter how fast NVMes are, if you put all your libraries in one drive (in my case that drive would have to be too big and expensive, more than getting to that size with smaller drives), the bandwidth will be the max that drive can give you. If you spread your libraries among different drives, they will load faster. Cubase is rather slow loading projects and libraries even on fast systems, so spreading them helps a little bit.
Yes, sometimes. Not in this case. I’m not going to waste days just because one program (or two that share most of the code) are not working correctly, because in that case it’s obvious that I can wipe the drive and reinstall everything and it’s not going to make a bit of a difference.
If it keeps giving you trouble…
For what it’s worth, if it were my system the first thing I’d check is the power supply. Double check the connections. Triple check that you have the right number of rails with proper ratings and plug everything into right ones. 98% of the time I’ve seen ‘screen tears’ like that making sure the power supply is rock solid sorted it out. Modern power supplies sometimes split things off into several rails with different ratings and recommendations on how to best spread out the load. I.E. On a motherboard that holds that many cards and SSD slots…plus a higher end graphics card, it can matter which rails you choose to get the most out of the power supply with that much kit.
Sounds like you’re running a power hungry setup. Higher end graphics cards, FOUR ssd drives, lots of memory, etc.
The next thing I’d try is checking the PCIe slot contacts, cooling, etc. The other 2% of the time I’ve seen tears like that, it was…
- A bad contact/connection. All it takes is a defective or bent contact pin in the PCIe slot or something and as temperatures and such change weird tears or artifacts start showing up. Usually it’s stuff you can fix without having to change out the entire slot (just need good eyes and small tools to make sure all the contacts are firm).
- Overheating. If you really see this ‘tearing’ with three totally different graphics cards then it’s more likely to be power, contact/cable issue…possibly a capacitor or something on the motherboard.
- BIOS/Drivers/Microcode/Firmware/etc.
I keep harping on these common points of failure because of those horrible screen tears. That symptom makes is much less ‘clear’ that it is caused by high level GUI/AES calls. That kind of image rendering is the job of the OS/Drivers/Hardware. Cubase does not ‘code the windows’. All they do is ‘call them up’, and there is no call to 'open a box with jagged torn screens full of funky artifacts). Such things are more likely to be problems like 'missing signals, messed up clocks, over/under voltages, borked firmware, etc.
If I didn’t see the tears, I wouldn’t be harping on about power supplies and other hardware related possibilities.
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I completely agree.
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If it now works for some time and then starts happening then I would pull up both the task manager and something like HWinfo64 and monitor the stress on the system as you begin working. Once there is an error look at them to see if/what subsystem is “stressed”. To me it now looks like perhaps Cubendo is accessing bad memory or driving up computer temperatures or voltages etc. I know you checked your system in some ways but perhaps you missed something.
(I would also of course make sure the project you are using to test is 100% from scratch. No old projects. And I would use stock plugins and VI only. Maybe you’ve done both of this as well.)
The fact that the vast majority of users do not have the specific window ‘tiling’ issue you’re having makes it look like a local problem to me. I don’t see how many of us wouldn’t have the same problem if it was ‘in the code’.
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When I bought the RTX 5080, even though the table on Asus’ website says it works fine with an 850 Watt PSU, I figured that I was going to put a high demand on that card and the system rendering from Blender almost every night. So I got a 1200 Watt TUF Gaming PSU, which is a generation over the one I had, so it has a proper cable for the graphics card, rather than having to use a three way cable like you have to in older PSUs.
Obviously while having the PC without the graphics card and the PSU I used the opportunity to blow it and vacuum it really well.
The majority of users that read this thread among hundreds of other threads. Doesn’t prove that a substantial amount of people have this problem.
Look guys, we’re going in circles and it’s beyond pointless at this point. I just don’t understand how all of you can’t see the simple logic that if it happens in just ONE program (or two that share code), the problem in that program, nothing else. I’ve spent hours the past couple of weeks testing this very same thing in almost every other program I have that has windows of any kind. No matter which program it was, not a single one did this except Cubase and Nuendo.
So I’ll simply submit my findings to Steinberg and see what they say. It’s a waste of time to keep arguing about this.
Well you keep saying it so we keep responding to it.
Like I said, you could say the same for the computer/user.
Forgive me if I missed this, but have you tried the same version and project on another computer? That would seem like an obvious thing to test. Just load it up on a laptop or whatever and run the project. Do windows get f-ed up the same way?
If yes - software maybe.
If no - hardware maybe.
I get it, it’s frustrating and can be a real PITA. Your suspicion that it’s a Cubendo bug that Steinberg can fix ‘might’ be correct. It’s just FAR from being ‘clear’, and the screen tears are the screaming red flags.
I use and love Blender too, but it does so many things differently from typical ‘Windows’ apps that I wouldn’t put too much weight behind the idea that it properly uses and stresses ‘Windows’ graphics capabilities. That one is ‘ported’ from some posix capable unix kernel, and typically depends on small portions of ‘open’ standards. It also tends to ‘sandbox and provide’ it’s own choice set of GUI ‘libraries’. Other than offering modules to make use of a few proprietary standards for rendering 3d objects (I.E. NVDIA cuda cores or whatever), it doesn’t go anywhere near the countless capabilities of Windows GPU capabilities, and all the proprietary stuff Windows drivers tend to support. Oh, it’s also worth mention that I’ve yet to find a version of Blender that isn’t chock full of show stopping ‘bugs’ when I really dig in and start to ‘use’ the software. It has swaths of broken modules, experimental features, etc. Sure, it’s free…but it’s not any gold standard for ‘bugless software’ that tries to make extensive use of proprietary GPU features.
Again, it’s true that when Cubase 12 launched, there were some GUI issues that ‘might’ well have been up to 50% or more due to high level coding mistakes (misinterpreting protocols and standards to initialize and use a GPU). The worst of them were discrete graphics card driver related. They were easily reproducible. So please don’t get the idea we’re just a bunch of Steinberg defending creeps trying to blame every issue on ‘the users’.
If we didn’t see those screen shots early in the thread showing tears/smears and artifacts, followed by statements implying, “It’s CLEAR that everything with my system is perfect!” we’d get off your case, because we all KNOW that app level GUI implementation bugs in Cubendo can be very real! You might have even found some. We’re just suggesting that in ‘this case’ it looks like something at a much lower level. Things that need to be sorted out before higher level software bugs can be ‘confirmed’, let alone fixed.
Hopefully you’ll get good official support, and they’ll send you a few diagnostic tests to try. No matter what the point of failure is, it has to be found before anybody can fix it (including Steinberg if it’s really a ‘bug’).
If it’s not worth taking all the time and money to sort it out, we understand that too! We’ve all been there before as well. I once had a rig that glitched with daws like crazy. Eventually just gave up on it, as it wasn’t happening on ‘other machines’. Many years later I finally figured out, by pure accident, that it was a specific model of SSD drive that I’d purchased in bulk that was the problem…as I started using more of them in different builds, the ‘issue’ returned, and I was like, “Ummm, well darn it! Now I know!” Something about the way that particular drive was designed (It did some kind of IRQ ping every few ms that caused real time glitches in audio drivers) made it absolute trash for real time file streaming (tho’ they rock at pure burst speeds…loading a full file into memory). It took me almost a decade to figure it out…now I just know not to host sample libraries, or anything else that needs to stream and process audio/video on those drives in real time. Plus, I won’t be buying that model of SSD anymore. I won’t even go near that ‘brand’ anymore without testing some sample units first!
We’re all throwing out ‘hunches’ based on decades of experience here.
A shop with the right diagnostic tools could probably sort it out with very little ‘human’ interaction/time, as they have the tools to isolate and stress test each component/chip while also monitoring the consistency of the power supply and more. First thing they’d do is pull your boot drive and put in their own diagnostics drive. With a high end rig it might well be worth it to find such a shop/lab. Such places will often be willing to cut you a lot of slack on ‘swapping parts’ that aren’t ‘defective’, but simply work better with your system. I.E. Equal quality RAM sticks, nothing wrong with either set, but something they have on hand simply works better on your rig…so they disclose their discovery and offer to ‘swap’ ram kits with you and give you full credit for the market value the RAM sticks you initially had in the thing.
Yes, I’ve had brand new power supplies, from companies with a good reputation on QC cause issues. That’s why over the years I’ve learned it’s the first thing to check (also one of the easiest). If I had a dime for every time I wasted all kinds of time rooting through a system only to discover slapping in a new quality power supply fixed it, I’d probably have a lot more hair on my head today 
Since I don’t own diagnostic tools to properly load/test/monitor a power supply, I’ve found it’s worth while to always keep a fresh one on standby anyway. I think of having a spare power supply on the bench ready to go at all times like having a spare tire in back of the car. It’s never a waste, because sooner or later it’ll be NEEDED.
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Please share the Steinberg response when you get one.
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I had the same issue with random screen tears like in the photos at the top of the thread. That was with an RTX 3080. RMA’d the card and the screen tears went away.
Don’t get me wrong, the window handling in Windows Cubendo is an inconsistent mess but in this specific case I think it’s probably a hardware issue.
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Ideally you should have a spare known working part for every computer component, sometimes it’s the only way that you can troubleshoot issues. Have you tested with a different graphic card ?
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I agree. I think OP said he he’s tried different cards? Hence I expanded into trouble shooting other components (Fresh OS on a new boot partition, Power Supply, Memory, Connectors, Cables, etc.).
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Can you please explain your monitor setup?
How many monitors are you using?
What are their native resolutions?
What type of cables are you using to connect each of them?