Generic question: has VST performance on a Mac taken a hit with version 8? My set up is in my sig line. Not the newest machine, but still reasonably powerful. I love Cubase Pro and it works like a charm in my set up, EXCEPT for the fact that it seems I can’t coax the same performance out of it even with the new ASIO guard 2 or whatever it’s called.
For example, and please forgive me if this is esoteric, I am running one instance of Iris 2, and one instance of 2C Audio’s new plug in Kaliedoscope as an efx insert. This configuration immediately pushes the Cubase CPU meter to between 40 - 60% at idle. Play some notes and it usually surges to 90% or more with the attendant crackles. My buffers are set to 512 or more. The plug ins are at their lowest quality except for Kaleidoscope’s analysis bands which are set to 512. (Lower doesn’t sound very good.)
Running either alone doesn’t peg the CPU though either one causes the CPU meter to move about more than a third up its meter.
I have a special project that is designed to ‘tax’ my system to the max;
all the way to ‘just before self destruction’. (choke plenty plugs used brah)
When I ran it after installing C8P, my cpu juice usage was ‘slightly’ but noticeably less.
I chalk it up to the improved ASIO guard but… dunno.
This 'puter is still using OS 10.9.x (Mavericks)
I have not yet installed Yosemite on this ax.
I’ll do the test again when I do and I will report back if things change.
You are not alone. I have taken a huge vst performance hit lately. And this is with the latest haswell 5960 processor, all ssd drives and 32 gigs of ddr4 2400 ram. Watch this video and see if this is your problem:
Wow. It’s similar, but not that bad. I feel your pain.
My issue is a general (though not catastrophic) decline in VST performance. Things don’t seem to go as far as they used to and the combination I highlighted is particularly problematic.
To be fair, I’ve been doing more research and have found out that there are a few more ways I can tweak Kaliedoscope to decrease its CPU usage. (And as it turns out, 2C Audio is very upfront about its usage real time vs offline and what to expect. Note to self: RTFM completely next time.) But that still doesn’t explain why configurations used before are less efficient now.
I’m wondering if a move to Yosemite might help. (I’m on 10.9.5.)
As to your issue: I would open a new thread on it specifically and post the video. It looks like you are running Windows, and one of the comments on YouTube was from someone with the same issue. Would be interesting to see the response from the forum.