Hi. I’ve been using C14 since it came out (been using Cubase since the Atari) and I love it. I’ve noticed a general improvement with load times and stability. However, I have various plugins from UAD namely Sound Studio / Capitol Chambers and the Electric Piano. In Cubase I can only use 1 of the above plugins and my CPU is running at about 80% which means I can’t add another because they all use about the same CPU power. I have a dual Xeon, 128gig Ram running windows 10. My thinking is that UAD plugins are very CPU hungry. Anyhow, I decided to try Reaper just to see if it was the plugins. I used exactly the same Fireface UCX and Asio drivers set at the same buffer and I could load and play ALL 3 plugins and I was at about 70/80% CPU. I know this is not a scientific test but shouldn’t Cubase do better than it did? Can anyone shed any light as to why CB14 seems to perform MUCH worse given similar conditions? By the way, this is a genuine question and not intended to start a debate about whether Cubase is better than Reaper. I’m just confused as to why the performance difference is so great. Cheers Jon
Hi,
have you downloaded the latest UAD software? There were quite a few updates for the native pugins lately.
There are UAD plugins which seem to be notorious troublemakers - like the Cooper Time Delay. I used it the other day and experienced unusual peaks- same same for more than 10 or 15 years by now regardless of the Cubase Version. Not a DSP power issue, tested with an octo, quad and duo. So that’s that. I hope your troublemakers don’t fall into that category…
Hi Reco29. Thanks for the reply. Yep all plugins are up to date. Still don’t understand why Reaper’s CPU wasn’t maxing out with the same plugins. Is Cubase more inefficient?
I can´t really say as I am not familiar with Reaper and the things that are going on under the hood compared to Cubase. My guess is that there is no simple answer, though.
I dont know how many cores your CPU has but a workaround is to install AudioGridder (you can do it in the same workstation) and add the most problematic plugins to an AG instance. This software distributes the work among the cores because Cubase sends all the plugins in a track to a single core. Just google for more info.
Thanks. I’ll check it out. Jon
I’m having the same problem with Cubase 14. The performance meters are high, unstable and Cubase is slower. I didn’t have this problem with version 13. I hope Steinberg fixes this instability as soon as possible.
do you mean sound city ?
As a test I’ve just loaded Capitol chamber and Sound city into a project on my M1 Max MBP and it hasn’t increased the cpu much at all.
I use both these plugins on my AMD 9950x studio machine as well and haven’t noticed anything unusual.
M
I have all three plugins so I just gave them a try (Win 11 on a 14700K, Cubase Pro latest).
With buffers at 128 I could get one instance of the piano and 9 instances of Capitol Chambers / Sound City to play clean. Adding one more instance of reverb caused ASIO Guard to start crapping out.
Even then, overall CPU consumption on Task Manager was around 9% and no single core was over 35%.
Not bad, but I really wish Steinberg would sort out the ASIO Guard issue.
Hi. Yes it’s the Sound City AND the electric piano. Jon
I don’t have electric piano sorry. I think what you’re coming up agaisn’t is single core loading. Reaper can sometime spread a VST over a few cores in a clever way so that’s maybe what your seeing.
As i said i have an M1 Max MBP and it performs very well with Cubase 14 , some plugins actually run better on that than on my AMD window machine.
There are plenty of great electric pianos out there, so i’d say if you need lots and your machine can’t handle it then either freeze/bounce in place or find a different one fro the many out there.
M
Hi. Thanks for the response. Yeah, I was wondering whether it was to do with single vs multi core function. I have read somewhere that when processing audio the number of cores is largely irrelevant (not entirely) and the CPU clock speed is more important. However, multi core CPU’s are utilised more across numerous plugins. Although I have 2 Xeon processors, they are old now and are running at around 2.5gHz with no boost. I am seriously thinking about purchasing the new Mac Studio M4 if and when it appears, although I have heard that the new ARM architecture for pc’s is lightening fast too.
Having said all that, I think you’ve answered my original question as to why Reaper seems more efficient than Cubase. Thanks. Jon
the way it works is all of the plugins in a plugin chain run on 1 core - this is where the clock speed comes into play - the number of plugins you can run in the chain will be limited based on the single core speed.
different chains can run on different cores.
that said, cpu performance on cubase has been poor for a while & a lot of us have been complaining without much help. the only resolution we are given is to use an external vst host like audiogridder (which is no longer being developed) .
as i’ve been paying attention to the issue, i’ve read people going out & getting an M4 & still have bad performance.
for me, I’m trying to push the decision out & I have not upgraded to 13 or 14 until I see Steinberg fixing the issue, I prob won’t be upgrading.