Sorry, just don’t care enough to make that effort.
I was mainly talking about AMD gfx cards having less issues for a DAW than NVidea not intel vs AMD cpu’s
Also the TR architecture from 2020 was known to be poor in regards to low latency performance. It has got better as they went to the later versions , however with the huge threads/cores available on TR cpu’s it has also been an issue with Cubase’ ability to deal with this .
The consumer AMD cpu like I have, 9950x works well with Cubase as its only a 16 core cpu.
Admitedly Cubase doesn’t perform as well as Reaper does in this regard unless you use audio gridder locally to host plugins in Cubase and in doing this you can match Reaper’s plugin loading performance with Cubase.
TBH, I’m wondering if the x86 gravy train is coming to an end and we’ll now concentrate over the next 10 years on ARM, like apple have done.
M
I dont know how to answer. And i seriously try to be gentle and diplomatic but let me tell you this. Any TR from 2020 onwards today are still the most powerful CPUs on the market. Widely used in Highend Filmproduction i dont speak only about music i speak about Water Simulations in Houdini with Terrabyte large datasets which sorry cannot work well on a ryzen. Because CPU Count and Multithreading matters. I agree to what you say about ARM, I own Cubasis of course the libraries are not that big like bbc so pro but my biggest project in cubasis on my old outdated 3gb RAM Ipad 9 which i dont even use anymore was able to run 56 Tracks with 88 vsts in 10ms latency. When 5 year old hardware can do this i expect that Cubase the mothership has no trouble with 20 tracks and 25 vsts. But the truth is the opposite.
When all avaliable Tools on the market running fine including all AI and Music tools. And Cubase 14 pro as well as Cubase 13 pro…. Not Cubase 12 pro have major Performance issues which is reported and voted or commented by over thousands of people on Reddit alone. There are flaws in Software design a matter of a fact. When my Cubase 12 pro runs 5 times larger Projects without a damn issue or problem why did i even upgraded to 13 and 14? For what? What would you do when your new BMW Car would only have half of the horsepower compared to what Steinberg states in the advertisements? Yes you would call your lawyer. I hope you understand now that this entire debate here is a reaction. Some if your points are okayish some not. What i read from your lines is this: buy better or other cpu hardware even when everything else works fine just to get Cubase 14 pro running fine. Ask yourself how does this would sound when i would say this to you?
Those type of mindset is the reason why Steinberg is not addressing the issue as a number one priority. When i believe current google statistics Cubase is already in a down spiral of Active searches for tutorials compared to all other daws which tells alot about active learning and interest into a software. Last time ive seen such a decline was with Autodesk Maya. Today no serious VFX house even consider to purchase Maya as their main tool. The decline started around 2020 before that it was the main tool of Hollywood Animation.
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alexsMusicComps
. I’m not trying to argue with you and I’m well aware that the TR cpu’s are the most powerful around for the applications you stated, none of which though require real time processing, they can be paralellised which makes a huge difference copmpared to real time audio that cannot unfortunately.
I was about to build a TR machine myslef so know the costs involved only too well, however looking to the future I’ve decided I’m not going to due to the various issues people have, and are still having with Cubase and TBH some other DAW’s ( Studio One) . Even Apple on their own hardware , with their own DAW Logic, still have issues that need sorting out , so the very nature of real time audio and modern multi core CPU’s is obviously NOT an easy thing to sort out.
In some senarios Cubase can outperform Reaper which seems to be the best performer.. up to a point though when it falls appart and the GUI gets like treacle.
There are plenty of internet DAW tests around to show performanced metrics across various DAW’s/CPU’s
I think we have to accept that real time audio that cannot be parallelised is a tricky issue to navigate and as we stand you have to look at your workflow and decide:
what’s the best DAW for ‘me’ and . what#s the best hardware to run said DAW.
this may mean a change of platform for some and for otherws it may mean just a hardware change, or for some it maybe a change of DAW and hardware if going to say Logic on a Mac.
Again, I was not trying to argue with you just adding my perspective as someone who’s been doing this a long time and been through many changes over the last 35 years of doing this professionally, and i agree with you completely that Cubase performance on high core cpu’s on Windows isn’t as good as it should be. My work around to leverage full CPU/RAM usage was as I mentioned to use Audio gridder and that solves any performance bottle necks for me and I can load up the 9950x to it’s max without ASIO guard meter hitting the stops.
I’m going to buy a loaded M4 MAx studio and keep my 9950x as an audio gridder server. I have a 10Gb Lan in the Pc and the M4 has 10Gb Lan too so I’ll have a strong connection between the 2 and have the best of both worlds.
I much preder the windows ecosystem and OS but as things stand now in 2025 I think the Apple silicone Mac is the way to go (for me) using Cubase for the next few years.
In a few years time I’ll reasess the situation.
Life’s to short to let this stuff get in the way of making music. I’m just loading some old projects at the moment that were recorded on an intel Q6600 2.4 ghz machine with 4 gig of ram. The record sounds amazing still today after nearly 20 years, made on a machine less powerful than my phone.
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Hi, just to clarify, I’m Alexis, and I don’t think I’m the one you’re referring to … probably “AlexsMusicComps”?
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You are creating a wild discussion already. And the statement that you will not provide a link to something on the public area of the internet because of a missing permission is bizarre, to put it mildly.
Basically you are telling me you can’t be bothered. Sad, man, very sad.
Since you politely asked me to stop something I would like to ask you to stop dropping a vague reference to something somebody said without providing a link, even though you have one. Thanks.
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NO! I AM ALEXIS!
Sorry, I’ll go quietly…
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Oh, come on… really? I truly don’t understand why some of you are like this: suspicious, dismissive, defensive, or sometimes downright odd in their responses.
What ever happened to giving folks the benefit of the doubt that they’re presenting issues or arguments or references in good faith?
Also, the Ben from VSL threads are on vi-control. He’s right: not hard to find. Many VEP users seem to be complaining about Cubase’s “high-idling”, or the VST meter showing values way too high for comfort when not much is happening at all.
I’ve hit this myself and I would truly, truly love for Steinberg to redirect their focus in the coming year to primarily performance and stability concerns. We can forgo an annual version update if it means the one we finally DO get is leagues more performant and stable than Cubase 14 is currently.
I think this would make a lot of people very, very happy and I would hope that it wouldn’t be a controversial shift in strategy here.
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Historically Cubase has always had ‘high idling’ compared to most other DAW’s . I’ve always put this down to having the control room, something no other DAW has. This will have some overhead for sure.
Also I’ve found that the ‘high idle’ state stays that way when youu start adding things in the project so when a small project is loaded the performance meters haven’t moved much from the idle state.
I agree completely that it would be great for the Dev’s to really get to grips with the performance above features now, it is a difficult task though keeping everyone happy.
We now have Mac OS-Intel and AS, Windows with x86 on 2 different hardware intel and AMD , both of which have entirely different architectures and now Windows on ARM.
Also everyone works differently and it’s hard to please everyone and get things working great for all scenarios.
I worked with the Steinberg engine team last year for 6 months trying to see if things could be improved but TBH all the test projects used seemed to actually coreload/thread pretty well and after backwards and forwards with various projects we drew a blank.
I think the fact that Logic audio on Apple machines still has issues shows that this is a diffficult problem to solve currently. In some tests Cubase out performs logic on MAc OS, Cubase also out performs Reaper on some Windows projects. Then we have ssituations where Cubase loses out to both … go figure..
I do not know what the answer is.
M
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I’ve built at least 3 computers dedicated for Cubase on Intel / Windows platforms and Cubase has always had performance issues and unreliable behaviour on all of them.
I’m currently on Intel 8th Gen and am overdue to build a new computer, however i’m just waiting to see how AMD Zen 6 vs Intel Nova Lake pans out, or I might wait for 1 more generation after that.
I experience everything from random Cubase and VST crashes, spiking performance meter, audio drop outs, laggy GUI, randomly corrupted project files etc. just generally bad performance and unreliable / unexplainable behaviour.
I’ve tried every fix suggestion from forums, performed countless Windows re-installations, replaced every hardware component. I still had issues even when LatencyMon had good results. If LatencyMon had bad results, no one could ever provide a solution., it’s always the same “oh could be the NVIDIA gpu driver”, “try disabling your network card”, kinda stuff that never worked.
It’s very dis-heartening when you drop $2,000+ on a new computer and Cubase just never seemed to perform properly on it from the very beginning. Meanwhile some other users report having 0 issues.
I feel like ASIO Guard and CPU core scheduling might be good places to investigate into. It would be nice if Steinberg could continue to build upon the debugging tools inside of the Cubase performance meter and the crash reports.
Just another quick example, the Steinberg Backbone VST will randomly crash Cubase and wont even generate a crash report, so now I don’t even try to use it in any projects. It’s very frustrating when we pay all of this money.
Some people seem to experience a plague of performance issues and unreliable behaviour while others don’t experience any issues. So yeah this is where I come to draw a blank and I don’t know the answers either. I just hope that Steinberg is continuing to prioritize stability and being proactive about it during development.
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I am running Cubase since SX3 and LOVE Cubase. Like totally. That said, the performance is currently really, really bad. A project with ±20 tracks, smart EQ on all, a few instances of smart Limit, a few reverbs and some UA compressors needs a massive buffersize in Cubase if it doesn’t spike, whereas the same thing in (for example) Reaper shows me 10% of CPU usage and is no problem at all. I even loaded LOADS of additional plugins in Reaper with no problem. That difference is really crazy and I am considering moving to Reaper, as I don’t need most of the stuff that comes with new Cubase versions.
Something in the system went off from C12 on and that makes me sad, because I really am bound to Cubase actually.
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I’m in the latter camp, the only issues I’ve ever had have been recognised by Steinberg and fixes released. Cubase 13 being a prime example.
But if Cubase works fine on the devs PCs, then the only option is to give them your PC. I know, stupid and unrealistic. But I doubt if these issues will be solved any other way.
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Hm. They got a lot of informations about that systems and should be able to target that. It cost almost 10 times more than Reaper. 
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This is such a completely… you know what? I’m not even going to get into it with you.
I have mentioned the idea of giving Steinberg our computers in other performance issue threads lol. However, I’ve always wondered if some of these issues could be identified by using Microsoft Windows debugging tools found in the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) and Software Development Kit (SDK), but unfortunately we don’t receive that level of support from Steinberg.
This is interesting because I find that Ableton Live and FL Studio seem to be more stable on my computer that has performance issues with Cubase also. However i’ve been having issues ever since Cubase 7 all the way upto Cubase 14. I speculate that there’s just something about my computer build hardware / driver configurations that Cubase just doesn’t like. I just hope my next new computer build has 0 issues or I might have to switch DAW.
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Brilliant?
Amazing?
Wonderful?
I know, it’s a gift.
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You know what? In Reaper I can add inserts and group tracks without interrupting the playback. That alone makes me switch probably. Drives me nuts in Cubase.
Steinberg, get your engine together!
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Yeah, a gapless audio engine has been a highly requested feature here in the forum over the years.
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