Just a quick update. I’ve been through 2 more bios updates but the latest (F4c) seems to have addressed my DPC latency issues! I have all cores enabled and XMP for ram (5600) and all is well.
Make sure you update your bios!
Now to see if Cubase 12 behaves…
2 Likes
My i9 12900k system was having all sorts of audio glitches and dropouts for quite a while now. I have the latest BIOS and Windows 11 patches, but that was not the issue at all. It was Windows 11’s “CPU Parking”. For some reason, I thought that if I had the “Performance” power plan selected, that “CPU Parking” would be disabled automatically. That is definitely NOT the case. “CPU Parking” was causing my system to have audio glitches even when I wasn’t doing anything that was CPU intensive, and this problem wasn’t exclusive to Cubase.
For anyone who may read this, if you are having problems with audio in Windows 11 with a 12th or 13th gen Intel chip, open your “Resource Monitor” and check to see if any of your CPU’s are “Parked”. If they are, then that is probably the source of your problem. Here is a video on how to disable “CPU Parking”.
I really don’t know who’s bright idea it was to purposely cripple a CPU’s cores just to save a little bit of electricity, especially in a desktop computer. I don’t know how they thought that would be possible without some kind of consequences. “CPU Parking” was making my computer seem to struggle doing some of the simplest things. If you have a 12th or 13th gen Intel, do yourself a HUGE favor and turn it off. Now, when I run DPC LatencyMon, my computer shows NO issues at all.
1 Like
@kb420ps Not wishing to dispute you observation and experience in making this comment. The Core Parking experience appears to be highly variable in terms of impact - some swear it makes a difference others nope. The actual setting is Hidden in the Power Schemes by default - Maximum Performance (and the Balanced+Performance Biased) power plans both have Core Parking enabled. The Steinberg Audio Power Plan also allows core parking with min cores on 4% (the default).
On my i9 13900k and ASUS motherboard core parking has no impact on Cubase performance (which I find peculiar but it works so I don’t fix it). Using either Steinberg audio or Max Power plans is all that is needed.
There’s a regedit that can be done to display the core parking setting and edit in a specific plan if someone finds it does make a difference for them and would rather just have it happen for single cubase power plan (I won’t reproduce here, google is your friend and I don’t want to cause people regedit grief and get flamed!). When it is enabled your power plan shows up like this under Advanced setting:
you can change the core parking as you can see.
1 Like
@beatpete Very happy for you! “Two more BIOS updates” - Gigabyte pushed those out rather quickly. I suspect you weren’t the only one with an issue 
Unfortunately I don’t have the “processor performance core parking min cores” option under “Processor power management”. Don’t know why…
I can see the CPU’s parked in the Resource Monitor and I have a 13900k. Following the earlier posters steps and disabling core parking totally saved my day. I was tearing my hair out why my Mergin Anubis had glitches every few seconds. First I thought it had to do with Ethernet cards etc (it is connected via Ethernet). Disabling core parking totally fixed it.
Thank you!
2 Likes
To display the core parking for a specific power plan you need to perform a Regedit. Google search should turn it up.
1 Like
Just to add to this, I had bad latency issues with my I9 13900K and, although core parking helped what completely fixed it for me was a bios update.
…just out of curiousity, downloaded the latest BIOS update, enabled core parking and my issues were back. So for me: only disabling core parking via Regedit brings joy.
Hi,
Steinberg seems to be aware of these issues:
I replaced my old system by a new one, Windows 11 and Intel I9 13900k.
System freezes all the time. Only way to get out is end Cubase in the task manager.
Open Settings - System - Power - and change the Power Mode to “Best performance”.
Cubase is running now for 48 hours without any problem.
You guys should try Process Lasso (PL) and Parkcontrol (PC).
It has become more relevant with w11 and intel eCores.
I have set PL to make Nuendo only use P-cores exclusively and all other 3rd party software like browsers, midi keyboard utilities, mouse utilities etc to run on the E-cores. I even have a few Windows processes running fine restricted to ecores, such as defender, indexing and search.
Using their custom power plan in PL also unparks all pcores permanently. So you dont need PC. But if you dont want to use PL you can just use PC.
1 Like
I have a 12900k since it’s release in 2021 and with Windows 11 it ran Cubase smoothly with an amazing performance.
Always the tinkerer I am, I did some tests with ProcessLasso though. But I never found any difference in performance. Windows 11 has a task-scheduler that is aware of that architecture and will distribute threads on the appropriate cores depending on the actual nature of the requeired processing. My experience with Cubase is, that this works very well.
Cubase real-time-critical threads always ended up on the P-cores on my system anyway, because of their nature. That’s what the API in Windows 11 is for.
Deactivating E-cores actually made the performance at least on my system worse rather than better. There is no reason why Cubase should process some GUI-stuff or MIDI-controllers on an P-core. An E-core works just as well. That’s actually the whole concept behind this architecture.
Over at Gearspace Pete Brown (MS Team leader for MIDI and Music Developement) explained that in greater detail. Pete thinks the Steinberg article is pretty misleading to say the least. E.G. that statement says, the " real-time audio task" was a background task and could end up on an E-core. But it is no background task in the first place, so the whole argument is pretty confusing.
My experience with the 12th Gen Intel is absolutely contrary to what Steinbergs article states and my experience is compliant to what Microsoft says about the implementation of their thread-director API.
What IS essentially though is using a power-scheme for best performance and deactivating core-parking also had an effect over here (though very subtle).
2 Likes
I can agree, Parkcontrol is a great app for turning off Core Parking in a correct way.
I’ve used process lasso for a long and can also recommend it. But I had a weird issue when disabling e-cores: E-cores Disabled - Some weirdness yesterday.
I’m hoping this issue gets sorted out so we don’t need to worry about it.
For those of you using process lasso, are you using the “bitsum highest performance” power plan? I would assume you need to have “Activate Steinberg Audio Power Scheme” unchecked otherwise the Cubase power plan takes over.
I don’t really have a dog in this particular fight, but generally speaking:
It makes little sense to play around with things like core parking etc. without doing proper performance testing before and after applying changes.
Plenty of people tweak Windows or BIOS etc. and say that’s what you should do but then it turns out they never measured if there was a change to performance. I just think it’s a generally bad idea to do these things without proper testing.
Imo, I think that usually people start to tweak when they have some issues - so tweaking is a process to fix issues not just for fun.
I asked Pete that too (probably same thread) and he said there could be an advantage in other ways: Although restricting Nuendo to just the P-cores doesnt gain much, if at all. The advantage I have found is “partitioning” the cores, customized to my use. So that I can keep Nuendo on the pcores and have a browser, some utitilites and control panels etc open and restrict them to only the ecores. This has given me some noticeable small advantage.
For example, if I want to browse while rendering something in Nuendo. Another is, I can leave the browser open on another screen showing browsers video playing and it wont tax Nuendo cycles.
Before using process lasso I would also get indexing or security scans occasionally causing sluggishness or overloads when using Nuendo with VSTi heavily. Now those processes are ecore only and they dont affect Nuendo.
After my current deadlines are met, I will try allowing Nuendo access to all cores and compare to only access to pcores.
After my post 14 may I still got problems.
I contacted Steinberg support and what they saw is that my drivers where in conflict.
So I made a clean install Windows 11, deleting all data on my system drive,
and used just what Windows 11 installed, so no other drivers (gigabyte, asrock, etc).
System:
Mainboard Gigabyte Z790 Aero G, latest bios version F6d, support I9 processors.
Processor Intel I9 13900k
Memory Bios XMP DDR5 6600Mhz
No tweaking, nothing, just windows 11 with all updates and the system is running
without any problem for 2 months.
4 Likes
Interesting.
1 Like
This podcast was also very interesting.
They mostly spoke about PC building for DAW use, Intel 12th 13th gen issues etc…
1 Like