Headlands, the Cubase 6 installation on the Mac in the recording store you went to was most probably set to 32bit mode and so your test project with 32 instances of Reverences hit the memory limitation of 32bit programs and crashed. Reverence consumes much memory and with 18 instances of it Cubase reaches about 3 GB of RAM where it will crash (the theoretical memory limit of 32bit programs is 4 GB but practically most 32bit programs will crash when they reach around 3 GB of RAM consumption).
I tested it on my system (see signature for details) and Cubase 6 32bit crashed when I tried to insert the 19th instance of Reverence, just like what you have experienced in the store. But if you open C6 in 64bit mode then you can instantiate as many Reverences as you want: I recreated your test project (I hope I understood your description: 9 audio tracks with 40 Multiband Compressors and 32 Reverences) and it worked just fine in 64bit mode. RAM consumption was at 5,86 GB and CPU at around 20% at a buffer of 1024 (at a buffer of 512 CPU was 26% and at 128 samples 54%). Note that my Mac Pro is from 2008 and is certainly far less powerful than the latest Westmere-Mac Pros so I think you should have no problem with a new one.
But keep in mind that Cubase on the Mac is 64bit capable only since version 6 that’s why there are very few 64bit VST plug-ins available for Mac at the moment, so running Cubase in 64bit mode may not always be possible.
Glad to help!
I think that in this whole discussion about performance one has to consider the drivers for the audio interface: low latency performance depends greatly on the quality of the drivers. I use a Metric Halo Firewire interface which has excellent and very fast drivers, especially considering the fact that it is a Firewire interface (which generally tend to have more latency than PCI-Express interfaces).
That being said, you will certainly get a better low latency performance under Windows 7 as all the tests show, that seems undeniable. But in my opinion the performance of Cubase 5 or 6 on a recent Mac with OS X 10.6 is still very good and it’s a very stable and pleasant working experience. I left Logic for Cubase and I’m very satisfied.
Hey Headlands,
You’re right, that is a lot of stuff to run. Like I said, and if you have the time, it doesn’t hurt to try in all out in Mac OS. As for VE Pro, I’m running that on my same Mac Pro as Cubase. Everything is all on one computer. It runs outside of Cubase just as if it was on another computer. I’m running the 64-bit and 32-bit versions. The 64-bit version I’ve loaded up many, many GBs of RAM worth of instruments which is very awesome. I only use the 32-bit version for stuff like G-Player that isn’t 64-bit yet to keep Cubase as memory free as possible so I can have room for synths and plugins and stuff if needed.