Cubase 14 Performance - even at no load

[Lonny_Handwork]

Hi all,

Apologies for another “CB14 performance” thread but I’ve yet to find a solution for my long standing woes so here we are.

I’ve had continuous performance issues with audio peaks causing drop outs in both CB13 and 14. My work around has historically been to set my buffer size high and to track with no (or few) plugins enabled. I would however really like to be able to track into something like a NDSP VST with reasonable latency. With a completely blank session, I’m getting a real time load of about 25% and peaks of greater that 50% (audio interface buffer set to 32 samples to push performance). With a single guitar sim VST (NDSP Gojira as example) and a UAD delay added to the session, I get real-time of 50% and 100% peaks (i.e. unusable).

Cubase with an empty session:

Cubase with two VSTs:

Current system: AMD Ryzen 9 5950x, 64 GB RAM, Win 11 latest as of today. Latest NVidia Studio video drivers. RME UFX III with latest ASIO version (although I had the same issues when I was using a UAD 8xp interface). Cubase 14.0.40.

Troubleshooting so far: As mentioned, I’ve been fighting this for more than a year (2?) now, hoping that a future maintenance update would finally fix my issues. No luck so far - hence the post. This week I completely wiped CB from my system (again) and reinstalled. Steinberg power scheme activated (though I’ve also tried manually enabling or preventing shut down of anything I could find in the power plan.). Clean windows boot. Defender temporarily disabled for testing. Dropbox killed - as well as any other process I can think of. Task manager shows no unusual resource use (in the above example, showing 4% CPU, ~700Mb RAM). Latencymon shows no issues. Process explorer does shows random spikes in the Cubase.exe process but I can’t see or track down a cause.

This system will easily allow Reaper to run 10 of the same NDSP plugins at the same buffer (32 samples) without dropouts. There is clearly something about my system that’s forcing CB14 to glitch - but I can’t find it.

For clarity: I’ve used NDSP plugins as an example here as they are relatively demanding but this happens with any load small number of VSTs or VSTis. I don’t need to set my buffer to 32 samples - I just set it this low for this “test”.

Any ideas before I throw in the towel?

Lonny

[glennloopez]

@Lonny_Handwork

There is clearly something about my system that’s forcing CB14 to glitch - but I can’t find it.

yeah i would say so. the computer/system. I doubt a Cubase update would solve it unless they change up their core code.

did you run latency mon? since Reaper is working fine it would be interesting to see what that app report back.

[RuneBorup]

Just a couple of thoughts here:

I would stay away from UAD (as in the UAD DSP plugins, not the native versions) in any kind of live tracking situation. If you put a UAD DSP plugin into live mode, it will break pretty much any system, since it needs to roundtrip the DSP card and leave very little room for error!

You’ll have to forgive me if i’m over-explaining something you already know, but here goes:

The Cubase Audio Performance Meter not a 1:1 indicator of CPU load, but rather an expression of how much TIME is left before the buffer has to be shipped off to the sound card.

Imagine a couple of audio channels; one with a lot of heavy plugins and a bunch with a light load, all going into a bus with some additional processing. You can’t really calculate the bus (and sends, master fx, ect) before everything feeding it is processed, so this is the reason why a lot of cores might be sitting idle despite the audio performance meter are approaching a maxout!

Also - there are two different “latencies” at play in Cubase: ASIO-Guard and the realtime / peak path. Whenever you monitor-enable something, it shifts that track as well as everything forward in the mix-path to the realtime thread, which runs at the buffer-size your soundcard is set to. Everything else goes to the ASIO-Guard thread, which - depending on your settings - runs at a much higher (virtual) buffer-size, which is way more efficient. So - subject to the “layout” of your session, shifting a track into the real-time path might generate a massive cpu load on a single core ..

My “fix” for these things are using a dedicated monitor-channel using a different output bus than the main mix , so the real-time audio have the path of “least resistance” so to speak.

Reaper handles cpu-core-scheduling differently than Cubase so i can’t speak to that, but i’ve had some success (in the scenario you’re describing) with using a tool like Process Lasso to steer Cubase to the performance cores only - and without core 0, since a lot of system stuff happens there. Obviously this takes you into tweak-territory, and your milage may absolutely vary

Hope some of this is useful!

/Rune/

[Lonny_Handwork]

Thanks for this.

While I did use a UAD plugin in my example any more than two or three plugins of any brand or type at very low buffer settings and I’m getting drop outs (clicks pops). Obviously I can increase the buffer size to address. I can also direct monitor using my interface (using input from my Quad cortex for example) and only record the DI signal into Cubase (and then enable the NDSP plugins on that after tracking).

It just seems to me that I should be able to easily track directly into the DAW with a handful of plugins enabled without needing to set the buffer to 512 or even 1024.

That said, I’ll try your “dedicated monitor channel” tip as well as mess with Process Lasso.

Edit: is it possible that Cubase “scales” differently with lower buffer settings than other DAWS? For example, at really low (32) Reaper far outperforms Cubase - on my system Cubase is unusable. But I’ve got a session of Cubase here running with the buffer set to 128 samples, with a dozen or so tracks each with a couple of plugins running and the performance is fine…

Thanks again.

[Psychlist1972]

You mentioned you’re on the latest Windows 11.

Try not using the Steinberg Power Scheme. Update that setting in Cubase then shut down Cubase. Go into Windows Settings > System > Power > Power Mode and change that to “Best Performance”. Then try Cubase again.

Pete
Microsoft