Love the new features - but slow and buggy

Nuendo
1

Hey Guys,

So, Nuendo 8.

I’m loving the new features I’ve tried so far.
The new window management is generally great. Having the transport bar at the bottom, long overdue, but good too.
Still getting to grips with Direct Offline, but again, generally it works well.
Interface generally looks great.
Can’t stretch the direct offline window, which is a tad small, but that’s a minor niggle.

But jesus, is it getting slow.
With the latest version of 7 I was starting to see more slowness creep into the App, and little bugs (mainly to do with tool switchingn as it opens another editor) were already a little annoying, causing Nuendo to poof.

But N8 has taken that to a whole new level.
-stretching notes in the midi editor can take seconds for a note even to be selected, before I can stretch it
-opening the lower window and scrolling to my selection from the time I double click to doing the action can take about 3-5 seconds
-the tool doesn’t always immediately switch to the correct context when moving between lanes and the midi editor. If I try and do something while its still working out what tool to switch to, Nuendo poofs.
Because it’s so slow, I don’t even know half of the time if it’s in the select tool or still pencil mode from being in the lanes.
Occasionally I’ll draw notes when i don’t mean to.

I’m getting concerend with the increasing slowness on the Mac, that I might have to go back to Windows to get some decent editing speed.
And I’m talking UI speed…ASIO wise it seems okay, but the slowness and stickyness of the app is really concerning me.

2

As a test, I installed bootcamp with Windows 10 on my machine with Nuendo 8, and the exact same setup in plug-ins etc.

The difference is rather striking.
-Asio performance is about 10-15% better under Windows with the same session. Not a massive difference, and it I was pleasantly suprised that ASIO/CORE performance is now pretty close, but still, you get a tad more juice out of Windows.

-UI performance - what an incredible diference!!! On the same session that graphically/GUI update-wise slows N8 down to a crawl, with updates slow and sticky, and opening parts often taking 3-4 seconds on the Mac, Windows is still flying.
On the Mac, when my cpu hits about 50% (this is with asio protect on), things get really, really slow.
The difference isn’t subtle; on Windows, the UI is still snappy and responsive, and I can still fly around the session without it feeling significantly slower.
On the mac, screen scrolling, general screen/meter updating is very, very slow, and most infuriatingly, editing becomes almost impossible (see post above)

The downside: on my iMac 5k, the DPI scaling in Windows is pretty terrible; and as N8 is still(!) not HDPI compatible, I can either run it in 5k, which looks fine but many GUI elements are way too small, or use system scaling which makes it look like it’s being run over a dodgy VGA cable - blurry and badly scaled, especially on text.

I’m getting really concerned; I love working on the Mac but I have to consider moving back to Windows, as the performance just isn’t there.
About to do a film and when I scored the trailer the Mac was barely keeping up…not in ASIO performance, mind you, but in terms of GUI updates.

I would suspect a GPU-accelerated GUI could make a massive difference here, especially with current gen GPU’s.
I work mostly in gaming and if you know what even the relatively low-rent GPU’s in the current batch of iMacs can do, they wouldn’t even break a sweat drawing Cubendo’s UI.
That is a terrible amount of work, so in the mean time, if any kind of UI scaling could be implemented so it at least runs properly on high res, that would be great…

3

I haven’t experienced quite the same amount of slowdown as you are experiencing, but definitely have a slow GUI and interface on Mac compared to Windows versions I’ve tried. Compared to Pro Tools, Reaper, and Studio One on the same Mac and with same plugins (aside from Pro Tools which uses a different plugin format, of course) Cubendo often moves slower and feels a bit dull-headed – the others are razor sharp and super quick with most of their actions. Even simple things like closing sessions and closing the app is noticeably faster on those DAWs, and what I’m saying applies to multiple Macs/other composers’ Mac setups that I’ve tried or used Cubendo on.

There is clearly a very serious issue for many users with the GUI and overall responsiveness on Mac, and I do know that Steinberg is aware of it and is working on it. As I’ve said before: I’ve been back on Pro Tools because I need to work at a fast level and Cubase 9 and Nuendo 8 just can’t keep up GUI-wise. I so very much want to go back to Cubendo but simply can’t until Cubendo is just as fast and responsive…I’m concerned that it may never be, but that’s the cynic in me. :slight_smile:

I’ll keep checking in to see if anything has changed, and of course I have previous projects that are on Cubendo so I need to use it for revisions to those.