Cubase 14 Pro: Performance Issues and Unreliable Behavior

Cubase
162

You’re putting words in my mouth, I didn’t say anything about TRIM.

Here’s a quote about SSD defrag in Windows:

“No, Windows is not foolishly or blindly running a defrag on your SSD every night, and no, Windows defrag isn’t shortening the life of your SSD unnecessarily. Modern SSDs don’t work the same way that we are used to with traditional hard drives.

Yes, your SSD’s file system sometimes needs a kind of defragmentation and that’s handled by Windows, monthly by default, when appropriate. The intent is to maximize performance and a long life. If you disable defragmentation completely, you are taking a risk that your filesystem metadata could reach maximum fragmentation and get you potentially in trouble.”

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd

163

Mine still automatically performs TRIM even when the Windows automatic optimize schedule is disabled.

So do whatever you feel is best for you I guess. Everyone is responsible for their own hardware.

164

TRIM and SSD’s file system optimisation are two different tasks.

165

You could be right, i’m not denying that. But I can’t find any Microsoft documentation that says otherwise.

Note: ​​​​​​​Hard drives are defragmented, which is reorganizing the files so that they are all lined up and easier for the drive to read. Solid-state drives (SSDs) are what’s known as “trimmed,” which is basically telling the drive where it can safely do cleanup work when it’s not busy doing more important things like saving or loading your files. It’s all optimization.

166

No, that should never have to be something we resort to. That defeats the whole purpose of the VST standard.

167

I can tell you directly that you’re very, very likely underestimating what these AI models can do. I can’t tell you how I know due to NDA, but I know: saw it do absolutely stunning work finding bugs that no human could find due to us not being able to store that much context in our noggins.

Look: the first and easiest way to know someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about with AI is that they will claim to know how it works at some fundamental level and therefore what its limitations are.

The real AI gurus will invariably confess that they simply do not understand what is happening inside these vast, inscrutable matrices of floating point numbers–because they don’t, because they can’t, because it’s too complex for any human to process and “see”, *Matrix-*style. That simply doesn’t happen. That is why we have a whole new field called Interpretability. Anthropic in particular has been making huge strides. And this is essentially what Ilya Sutskever’s SSI venture is all about: knowing enough about what is happening at the neuronal level to guarantee that a straight shot at artificial superintelligence doesn’t end us all. Seems like a smart thing to want to know how to do, now doesn’t it?

But it is absolutely true that if you assume you know what AI is or can or can’t do now, you’re in for a series of shocks: you’re probably going to keep wrong-sizing your models for the task at hand, for one. You’re probably going to assume that bespoke models trained on something very specific are going to be better at it than larger, more general models.

I’ve found that the opposite is true: dealing with a model that is more generally intelligent usually because it is simply much larger without hitting overfitting issues simply means that it’s actually more intelligent far more often than not, and that bump in IQ points means a lot more than a significantly dumber, smaller model being trained on a specific type of code, often at the expense of having a good grasp of natural language for VRAM usage reasons, most often.

I’ve seen all sorts of “data scientists” in my field screw things up so unbelievably massively to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that I don’t even wanna think about it anymore.

It makes much, much more sense to listen closely to those living people who have been at the forefront of the Revolution and understand the fundamentals directly because they actually discovered them: they tend to have a far keener grasp than the clueless punditry that frequents r/singularity or r/futurism or similar, and especially many of those babbling incessantly on LinkedIn or their own YouTube channel wearing their Star Trek garb. Ugh.

168

C14 going crazy on my I9-14900K … working is nearly impossible with a few more straining plugins. I even see audio playing (VU meter flickers) but nothing comes out of it.
I can’t even disable any core, Cubase (or whatever) automatically enables the CPU(s) again. Then it also spams my %appdata% folder with thousands of small files every 60 sec. The files are called .Local_tempxxxx, where xxxx is an increasing number.

arggg.

169

Damn that sounds frustrating. Have you tried playing around with the Bitsum Process Lasso application to see if that can help improve the Cubase performance on your system ?

170

It doesn’t sound like you’re describing a machine with performance problems, it sounds like a machine with configuration problems.

What ‘straining plugins’ are you referring to?

What steps are you taking to disable cores (and why)? Cubase has no insight as to what cores are running and certainly can’t restart them.

Which %appdata% folder are you referring to which is getting filled with Local_temp files? Have you opened any of these files to see what’s in them?

171

Hello :slight_smile:

I did not yet try the bitsum software, only tried latency mon but there no problems were found.

It all started with C14.
I’ve tried Ozone 12 unlimiter plugin. As soon as I enable that, the sound stops. It doesn’t even stutter, it stops. The VU meters work, but no audio. In an empty project it works though, but the asio-guard already is at half. I run the steinberg power profile, I’ve enabled the “core park options” in energy settings etc

I have to set the asio buffer to 1024 on my RME UFX fireface to be able to work, before it was set to 128 samples, asio-guard is set to high level.
Sometimes, if a plugin has a spectrum analyzer chart included, it stutters as soon as it’s enabled, if I hide it, I can at least listen to audio.
(talking about projects with a backing track and 3 to 5 vocal tracks, nothing special)

To disable cores I use taskman → details → affinity
e.g. uncheck core0 and core1 or the E-cores at the end of the list. Cubase stutters for a moment and that’s it, the checkboxes are checked again soon as I view affinity again.
I will not disable the E-cores in bios and I also use the intel settings for the CPU which should prevent the intel “bugs”.
But, I have to mention I use Win10 because I actually hate W11 with all its dangerous updates :wink: and because I don’t want to spend a month to install everything again :confused:
Oh, just running Cubase after a fresh boot makes no difference.

I mean the appdata folder that contains the 3 standard folders (C:\Users\(username)\AppData)

The files are 2 bytes each, no content and appear every 60 sec if Cubase is started.

C14 had some weird changes, for example, the mixdown of a song is faster the higher the asio buffer size is. With C13 and lower it took some seconds to mixdown a project, now it takes longer than the song itself :o

I started with C7 I think, or whatever the version was in 2007 :slight_smile:

172

You can always try disable Nahimic services on Windows. That solved some of my issues.

And from this thread I would really wish for an aggregated knowledge-base for existing and new users to find common advice for hardware recommendations and software optimisations for Cubase. As searching through forums with thousands of posts is highly inefficient.

173

And you think that is running on everybody’s machine? On mine it doesn’t where I have made a direct comparison between Cubase 12, 13 and 14 which got worse in my use case (also because of the usability which I posted on another thread). I’ve deinstalled Cubase 13 and 14 for now and stay with 12 until this is resolved, which might never gonna happen… :(.

174

@ steinberg

Big Times Thank you Steinberg! Cubase 15 Pro has non of these issues anymore! Rock solid performance !!! It even loads up in like 2 seconds after Double click on windows 11 H2

Thank you for listening!

175

Mh, I just tried Cubase 15 with that project I’ve used for my performance measurements here. I pretty much get the same readings (if not even a bit higher with average AISO guard load over 105% - does that even make sense :rofl:). Startup time is pretty much same. Going to do a comparison of 12-15 in the next few days…