Cubase Pro 9 Freezing and performance meter jumping to 100%

Hello all!

Never posted here before and have had a browse around to see if anybody has had this issue before, but can’t seem to find anything that relates directly. Apologies if it is out there somewhere!

I purchased a new PC last weekend because my old one just couldn’t handle the pace anymore. Decided to go with a Dell XPS 8910 as it seemed pretty decent and the RAM could be ungraded to 64gb, which I thought would be handy in the future for all those sample libraries I plan to buy. Sadly, not even a few days in I have come across an issue that is causing some frustration.

I created a simple test project just to compare the new PC to the old one. It had one midi track for EZ Drummer 2, one midi track for the Kontakt player (with one string library loaded into it) and seven audio tracks for guitars and bass.

When all tracks were playing the performance meter barely even lit up, which I was really pleased about because my old PC was way over half way at this point! Then after a short while I noticed that every now and then the performance meter would light up fully and jump to 100%. Everything would cut out briefly before kicking back into gear. It appeared to be random, sometimes happening once every 5 minutes, other times happening as much as 5 times in a minute. The project has also frozen completely a couple of times after this has happened and the only option has been to close it via the task manager.

Has anybody here ever experienced this before and are there any known fixes for it please? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Details of what I am using are below…

Dell XPS 8910
6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz)
Windows 10 Home (64Bit)
16GB, 2133MHz, DDR4
2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive + 32GB M.2 SSD Cache
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 750Ti with 2GB GDDR5 Graphics Memory

Other hardware
Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface
M Audio Oxygen 61

Installed products
Cubase Pro 9
Native instruments Komplete 10 Ultimate
Project Sam Symphobia
Spitfire Albion
Cinebrass Core
EZ Drummer 2
Soundiron Olympus Elements
Peavey Revalver MkiiiV

Welcome to the forum :wink:

A tough one for sure. Some thoughts…

Are all of your VSTs the latest 64 bit version available?

Also-
Sometimes an HD audio driver (Realtek… but, could be named something else) gets installed with the graphics driver for Nvidia cards. I see on our forum that some have mentioned that this HD audio driver causes problems with Cubase (even though you have not chosen it to work with Cubase). So… if that driver is installed and you don’t use it for anything else on your computer, it may be a good idea to get rid of it. You would do this by downloading the graphics driver for your card directly from Nvidia and when installing check the clean install option and use the custom install option so you can choose only the graphics driver with nothing else.

Regards :sunglasses:

You should test your system with this in the first instance

Latency check utility is correct.
Look for my posts about parking cores.
Also verify your power scheme preferences and last but not least, your video card drivers.In some cases an older driver will fix the problem sometimes the latest driver will do the job.
Something else that could cause problems is the network adapters.
Disable them at device manager and check your performance.

Cheers

Thanks guys…really appreciate you taking the time to offer assistance. I’ll be trying all of this when I get home!

All sorted! Seems it was the HD audio driver that was causing the problem. I disabled everything apart from the Scarlett…and haven’t had any issues since. Thanks very much for your help. :slight_smile: