You’re the second person who has mentioned that problem with Kontakt. That would be a significant bug in Kontakt, but I haven’t seen that myself. Is there anything special you need to do to make empty instances of Kontakt use cpu?
The test we use is to stress DSP (and not disk I/0). So we use a serial chain of DSP intensive plugins processing a single stereo file where the only disk I/O is to read that single file from an SSD (which shows no disk I/O load at all). Because it is a serial chain, the DAW cannot parallelize audio as when doing a mix - as there is no summing to be done, no use of buss sends, etc. We’ve run this test with the same chain of 3rd party plugins with: Cubase 10.05, 10.20, 10.30; Logic 10.4.4, 10.4.5, and Presonus Studio One 4.1.1 on Mac OS 10.13.6. Logic makes the best use of multiple cores, runs all plugins in this serial chain using about 245% of CPU capacity of a 4 core i7 chip. Cubase uses 145% of the chip or it uses 1 less core than Logic before overloading, and runs about 2/3 of the plugin load. StudioOne does worst in this test and does not really get past using even 1 core before overloading; it’s pointless to use it on this project. More interesting is that Cubase forks about twice as many threads as Logic. Depending upon how multi-threading is designed, you might expect a higher thread count to enable more audio/parallel processing across multiple cores. But the higher thread count in Cubase looks like it results in the opposite behavior; more threads may be competing for processing and block one-another. This could be because Cubase’s thread design is still more optimized for Windows and not mac OS. It’s also worth mentioning that Cubase had the benefit of its audio buffer set to the max of 2048 samples (compared to Logic’s max of 1024), and that Cubase was set to 32 bit precision (while Logic was set to 64 bit precision); Cubase could not run the project at all when set to 64 bit precision. I don’t think anyone expects a non-Apple DAW to beat Logic’s performance on Mac OS 10.13 and 10.14 as it is likely the most optimized for the Mac. But we did hope to see better performance from Cubase, and StudioOne simply cannot make effective use of multiple core CPU’s.
cdr80, interesting results - what asio guard was set for Cubase on those tests? I feel that may be a factor for a non-live/playback only performance test.
Logic’s use of dual buffer is what makes it strong, Cubase has this option with the asio guard but very few reference it.
You’re confusing “parallel” from an audio engineer’s point of view with what is computationally parallel. What you call parallel is actually computationally serial. Anyway, a better test would be to use the same conditions across DAWs instead of different conditions. And the best metric of performance is always maximum number of tracks, not % of cpu capacity used.
Anyway, the purpose of this thread is to provide a benchmark project file, included in the first post, that others can download and try for themselves. If you have test results for that benchmark, please post your results here. If you want to discuss a different test with your own benchmark, it would better to start a new thread, rather than confuse the issue here with results posted from multiple benchmarks.
I thought this was a well known issue that Kontakt performs poorly in Cubase, i’m sure the developers know about it.maybe not?
many of my composer friends have moved to logic for this reason alone. The export times are so much faster in Logic too
I thought this was a well known issue that Kontakt performs poorly in Cubase, i’m sure the developers know about it.maybe not?
many of my composer friends have moved to logic for this reason alone.
Strictly speaking, it’s not that Kontakt performs poorly in Cubase. The issue is: there is a bug in Kontakt that unused instances consume cpu when you have large numbers of them. A virtual instrument should never consume cpu before you send a note to it! I was finally able to reproduce it, but only when using nearly 200 unused instances of Kontakt in my session. The reason you don’t observe this in Logic is because the AU spec has a feature that sweeps this bug under the rug so you don’t notice it. VST3 has the same feature. I can’t answer if NI knows about this bug or not, but if it is important to you I would suggest contacting NI. If they won’t fix it, they should at least provide a VST3 version of Kontakt to hide the problem. In the meantime, the only workaround is to use an AU host like Logic instead of Cubase.
the only workaround is to use an AU host like Logic instead of Cubase.
Strictly speaking, changing DAW, plugin types and possibly migrating to a different OS is not really a workaround, it’s a complete overhaul of your current setup. …surely disabling unused instances is a better workaround?
You’re right, adjusting your workflow is the better workaround. Abandoning Cubase over this issue would only make sense for someone who isn’t willing to adjust their workflow.
In either case, someone who is inconvenienced by this problem should be taking it up with NI instead of relying on Steinberg or Apple to fix it.