Cubase 8.5 strange real-time peaks

Cubase
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1

I have Cubase 8.5.30 on Windows 10 and It’s been working perfectly for years. In the last 6-8 months or so I started to get some weird real-time peaks and cracks while playing audio or recording. At first I thought it was just temporary or had something to do with my old HD-drive where some of the sessions were. I moved all the sessions to SSD, but it didn’t help.

Now I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this with no luck:

  • I checked and update my motherboard drivers
  • Checked and updated my sound card drivers
  • Tried different usb ports for my sound card
  • Bought a new sound card (!)
  • Tried repairing the installation of Cubase
  • Tried booting in safemode to see if there’s a background app disturbing Cubase

Nothing of the above helps.

I realized it was not about sound card and tested 3 other DAWS. None of them have the issue. The problem only appears when using Cubase.

The problem seems to be present all the time regardless of the size of the project or plugins used etc. If I start a new Cubase project with only a master track, no plugins, no audio tracks - nohting, the real-time peaks are overloading all the time. The only thing that helps a little is setting up the buffer size, but it’s till acting weird and making recording impossible. And before the problem appeared I could easily use quite low buffersize with no problems what so ever.

Things that might affect this is that I bought a new CPU (Ryzen 7 3700x) and GPU (Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti). How ever I haven’t found any clues that they would be causing the problem.

I’m clueless. I’ve been using Cubase since 2003 and never seen anything like this.

Any idea what this could be and what should / could I do?

2

Have you tried running latency mon to see if this shows anything? What about running windows ultimate power scheme?

3

Over the last 30 or 40! years, 99% of my Cubase hardware issues have been due to the system hogging the PCI bus with video oriented calls.
NVidia, Ryzen,and even Microsoft only seem to address VIDEO speed,
so as a result even the “performance” modes just give more bus time to the video card. ( PCI Latency )
In the old days, the first suggestion was to disable video hardware acceleration. These days, options like that are inaccessible to the user,
so we just have to Google each other’s posts until someone stumbles upon a solution.
I suggest using the PCI Latency Monitor, and disable the items that are taking up too much bus time.(If you can!)
Possibilities are: video card settings, wifi/ethernet card, or even Ryzen CPU utilities, although that can quickly get into the deep weeds.
Check out the PCI Latency Monitor, and good luck from there!