Graphic cards ARE important when dealing with ASIO spikes and audio dropouts

Steinberg Lounge
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It would be great to get a users list of great working cards to save others the hassle of trying to decide

After taking time and building a newer Pc i tried three types of graphics cards , my 12 year old well capable HD7790 and i never had much trouble with peaks , had troubles but not peaks , i bought a new GT730 series that Steinberg say they support the 700 series upwards and i had horrendous problems with not being able record VSTi’s on a lower buffer than 256 or even playing back a project on 256 so i bought another graphics card ,a GTX1050 and guess what ? ALL my spikes have gone , it doesn’t matter if i open ,close anything , start , stop ,the Asio meter (apart from disk streaming ) does not move or peak out at all , all yesterday a worked on a fairly large project for me and not once did the ASIO meter peak to the red , i was pretty shocked as Steinberg state that graphics cards are not important , well to my personal system , graphics is damn important as i found out yesterday , it makes the difference of peaking out from a quarter and glitching to sitting totally stable at a quarter . So my conclusion is , if anyone on Pc that isn’t running a 12/13th gen has peak problems a possibility is your graphics card .

If i ran Spectral layers 9 (which is the most intense graphics program on the comp) with the Latency mon open i would get horrendous far into the red spikes spikes in the Mon by just moving the mouse on screen with a 700 series graphics card .

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So not liking this at all i bought another more capable graphics card GTx1650 and ran ran the same test with spectral layers and guess what ?

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BOTH TESTS ARE WITH EXACTLY THE SAME PROJECT OPEN with Spectral Layers running in the background .
I must add , i use 3 monitors so i think with the Gt730 it was just not man enough for the job but having 4 hdmi ports on the card i thought i would give it a go .

So this was my little non scientific test to show that , well ,yes graphics cards do make one hell of a lot of difference on how a DAW handles audio dropouts and since this test the Cubase ASIO meter now sits stable and i can actually record anything i want lower than 256 without the Asio peaking out .

even if this little test only helps one person , it’s help :wink:

1 Like
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I agree they do make a difference. I don’t think steinberg should recommend any cards as it depends on the motherboard as well. It also depends on the driver you load. Most of the time it’s best to let windows load a driver and not use the manufacturers drivers which can be more pointed towards gaming. I tried two in my i9 I got two years ago. My old 1030 and the onboard. Both didn’t cause spikes but the onboard intel graphics had a better picture on 4k. I never loaded drivers. I just let windows detect and load.

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Was this running multiple screens ?
Yes i think the 700 series are only good for one screen , they do support 4k .
You right about drivers , same with Audio drivers , you need to be choosey when it comes to it .

With Cubase 12 on two different machines the only issues i have had are graphics related . something has changed in C12 as my old 3370k runs C11.5 with three monitors flawlessly but as soon as you use C12 , you get a DMP saying Graphics2dp or something like that .

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It’s better to use the manufacturers’ driver, but with the recommended optimizations for audio use.
My AMD RX570 works much better and the system is more reliable with the driver.