I have both cubase 8 pro 32 and 64 installed on my windows 10 machine x64 and 16gb ram. I was having issues a few years ago with 64bit cubase and someone suggested using 32 instead. Now i’m finding that 32 is extremely slow. is it safe to make the switch over to 64 and will it help performance?
I don’t know which issue you were having but using the 32 bit version was obviously a dirty workaround and you were supposed to have switched back to 64 bit Cubase years ago. The 64 bit version has been the “main” version of Cubase since Cubase 5.
32 bit applications can only use 2 GB of RAM max. The slowness probably mostly comes from Cubase running out of memory, and the 64 bit version will fix that. The current version (Cubase 9.5) has improvements to the graphics performance which will help Cubase run even smoother.
You might have to reinstall a few plugins if you didn’t install the 64 bit versions. Ancient 32 bit plugins will run better and more stably if you buy jBridge.