Under heavy stress, how evenly does Cubase distribute the load of all of your plugins? Kind of an odd question, but I do work exclusively with heavy synths and sample libraries. So, when you’ve pushed your computer to the absolute max, say, sessions that use 80-90%+ of your CPU, how gracefully did Cubase handle things?
I’ve actually been looking at trying Cubase for a long time, but my current project that I’m working on in Pro Tools 11 kind of tipped me over the edge as it’s failing to allocate resources properly, thinking that it’s maxed out and causing audible issues when really I’ve got another 70% of my CPU just hanging out and doing nothing. It’s a well known bug and now it’s in my way.
I’m at the point where I just need something that works and for a composer/producer like me, and many of you here, Cubase was probably a better fit to begin with. I just need to know I will have a DAW that can scale with my computer’s resources and not cut out before my computer does. I know that’s difficult to answer, but I’d appreciate any insight.
Thank you very much for your time.
Current setup:
Windows 7 and 10
Core i7-3820
16GB 1333 DDR3 Memory
Multiple SSDs and HDDs for OS, Samples, Projects, etc.
Digidesign 003 Rack
Mostly work with Native instruments, Serum, iZotope, EWQL products
The DAW will pretty much always max out long before your CPU does. After each audio block is generated and processed across the cores, they all have to be serialized back onto a single core. I’ve not used Protools but I do use Cubase on a machine with two 6 core processors and it scales the CPU load evenly.
Funnily enough if, I was looking at Windows Resource Monitor while I worked on a large project yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see the 12 CPU cores very evenly loaded at about 85%.
If you can be bothered to search my posts from the last couple of years, you’ll see I’ve done some tests on this and core loading varies greatly depending on how your tracks are routed, how many groups you use etc. In a nutshell, if you have one track with lots of CPU intensive plugins routed to a group track, also with lots of plugins, this will hit one of your cores harder than if you just have a load of tracks each with a single plugin (which allows the load to spread amongst various cores). You might therefore max out your CPU even if all the other cores are not doing much work.
Certainly from my observation yesterday, things are currently working well in real world situations!
It’s a well known bug and now it’s in my way.