I saw a lot complains about how poorly performs 12th and 13th gen Intel CPUs with Cubase in Windows 11. To be honest I dont have such issues by myself, but I want to share with you how you can set up Cubase to start only with P-cores. Once you make this shortcut, just start it, and Cubase will run only on P-Cores. No more hassle to disable E-cores in BIOS or set every time in Task Manager CPU affinity manually.
Go to your Cubase.exe file location:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 11
Right click on Cubase11.exe and choose to create shortcut on Desktop
Please be careful and use correct " symbols. (Steinberg forum automatically converts those symbols and if copy directly it will not work, you need to copy " symbol 2x times manually)
Insted of FFFF value choose according to which cores you want to run:
CPU - HEX
For example I have i7 12700K which have 8 P-cores and 16 threads. So I choose FFFF as it will allow Affinity to run only on first 16 cores which are P-cores.
Click Apply button.
Click on Change Icon button
Click on Browse in opened window
Go to C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 11 and choose Cubase11.exe
Click Open
Choose Cubase 11 icon in window
Click Ok
Click Apply and Ok
Now when you will launch Cubase via this new shortcut, CPU Affinity will automatically switch to your preferred core count.
In my case it’s easier turning of e cores in bios. I have an overclocked i91300ks and when I disable e cores and test cubase the results are not as good, especially in high track count projects. I believe ms and intel have improved thread director in the latest build of win 11 so the issues relating to this matter are, in my case anyhow, irrelevant.
And I agree, I’d rather not mess around with workarounds like this if I don’t have to (that’s Thread Director’s job) and yes, with the latest Win11 build, things are running pretty smoothly for me as well.
Its up to you. If all works as should then leave it as is by defauld of course.
This thing do same as if you manually set CPU affinity in Windows Task Manager.
I’m running an i7-12700 with newest build Win 11 and Cubase AI 6. Certainly an OLD version of cubase. I have BAD audio drop-out problems and just found this thread. I’m going to try the P-core shortcut described and see if it fixes drop-outs. Probably upgrade to cubase 12 after that. I intend to update this with my findings.
So I run it from the shortcut and it seems better but I’ll have to spend some more time with it as the drop-outs are intermittent and may still show-up. One thing I don’t get is the p-core, e-core, thread thing. My i7-12700 has 8 P cores, 4 E cores, and 20 threads. In Task Mngr details it shows 20 cores (???). If I want to run only P-cores why set the first 16 cores active (FFFF) and not the last 4? Why do the 8 P-cores become 16 for this purpose? Weird…
P-cores are hyperthreaded so 8 physical cores have 16 logical cores. E-cores dont have hyperthreading so they are 4 in 12700 example. P-cores are shown first - so first 16 cores are actually 8 P-cores.
If you’re having trouble with skipping and stuttering, you may have an issue with Core 0. WHich is used by windows for drivers etc. This leaves Core 0 and uses upto whatever Hexcode you need.
Begs the question, why would driver vendors care what core they run on?
Additionally, if there are known applications that do not run well on E-cores, would it not be reasonable to require applications to request allowing E-cores, rather than include them?
There’s a lot of “folklore” from end users trying to get Cubase to behave as expected, to the point that developers have programmed applications like Park Control and Process Lasso. Is this simply because application vendors have not yet implemented the proper requests to the OS to behave as needed?
Very few apps have any issues with e-cores of any sort. They just run.
And it’s not always that driver vendors care, it’s that they specify “get a thread on the first core with capacity”. But as I understand it, some do actually say “core 0”. It could be the same kind of mental misunderstandings that lead people to have to do all sorts of other things to try to control the cores on their PCs. If you’re on a PC with a lot of drivers that behave like that, then using something like process lasso to avoid COre 0 can sometimes help.
The other thing to note. There’s earlier information in the thread about First N cores are X and others are Y. That doesn’t hold across generations. My 285k has a very different layout. But that kind of hard-coded logic is how you end up in this situation with a driver built with one processor in mind not acting the same way several generations later.
I can’t speak to Cubase itself. Others have done more analysis on that than I have.
I do almost no tweaking to my PCs. You can always do more to eek out X% more, but then that becomes the hobby/job, and you’ll be constantly chasing it as algorithms and firmware get updated. As it goes forward, the more you tweaked, the more you need to tweak.