Neural DSP birthday sale is on, and there’s no denying they make some of the best sounding guitar and bass amp emulation plugins out there. I have trialed several using Cubase versions 12,13 and 14; and would certainly purchase several, except within Cubase they are so CPU intensive, it makes the DAW unusable. Is that still the case with Cubase 15?
I’ve been playing around with NAMs and by their nature they are CPU intensive, even outside of Cubase. I found if you only have one loaded (like an amp or a pedal, but not both) it is not too bad. I’m using Cubase Artist 15.0.21 to test them. They do work great though.
I have two of their plugins, and have no issue with them on C14, perfectly usable (I have an AMD 7950 PC, but even with my older Intel 8775K (?) it wasn’t much of an issue). But regarding CPU usage, that depends for the biggest part on your CPU, not on the Cubase version.
What exactly mean by “make the DAW unusable”? Do you get dropouts? Is this while having record enabled on the track or not? Is it also a problem with an empty project with just one track of the plugin?
Just like I said. To put is plainly Cubase runs like garbage whenever I’ve tried NDSP, and also UAD guitar plugins. I can run 20 instances of Helix native without printing a single thing, probably more if I wanted, and no problems what so ever. But just 1 track of NDSP or UAD and ASIO goes crazy. 2 tracks, forget about it, spikes, pops and clicks all over the place. Especially when tracking. So I was wondering if anybody has experienced Cubase 15 performing better with these plugins instead of wasting my time and downloading more trials.
As I wrote, no problems here, I just tested two tracks of the Plini X plugin (default preset) in a small project of 5 synth tracks, no dropouts at all, regardless of record enabled or not, pretty much same ASIO usage in C14 or C15. High CPU usage, yes, but similar e.g. to Amplitube 5 or GR6 (don’t have Helix or UA). AMD 7950X CPU, 64G RAM, Fireface UCX with 48KHz sample rate and 128 samples buffer size.
What are your computer specs, audio interface and settings?
In general, I find NDSP plugins to be quite the CPU hogs indeed compared to other plugins.. Still manage to have 2-3 instances running on my 8yr old CORE i7 Laptop.. they do sound great.. but would profit from a proper code optimization imho..