NO rant , just facts Cubase 13 Audio engine Spikes compared to Cubase 12

[rickpaul]

@Ed_Doll

The processor affinity seems to play a role in here. To carry out the optimizations for the newer hybrid CPU environments, we had to change the behaviour and older non-hybrid CPU systems might have been affected negatively by these changes. At least, this is our first assumption that we are having a closer look at now. However, this may not be applicable to all the different reports in this topic but we have to take one step after the other now. Thank you for your patience in advance.

I’m not sure if you’ve also see a thread I started that turned out to be related to this:

In Cubase 13 ADDING a HALion track may prevent dropouts

Okay, this is really weird – I initially read about it in a Facebook group, then experimented with it myself in my latest project. The basic scenario is, you have a project that has audio dropping out, and you can’t just adjust buffers or other similar things to cure that, BUT, if you add a HALion (Sonic 7 in my case) instrument track to the project, all of a sudden the project plays smoothly. And this is repeatable, not just a temporary thing – e.g. disable the Halion track, and the dropouts …

Short summary is that adding a HALion (or other softsynth) track to a project that was dropping out badly made the project play back just fine, assumedly due to its adding a real-time ASIO path, which ended up on the first CPU, which had been badly overloaded compared to other CPUs prior to adding the thread, and that lessened the load on the first CPU while spreading the load more evenly to other CPUs. (I also tried changing processor affinity for Cubase13.exe in Task Manager to avoid the first CPU, but that did not seem to stick like when I’d tried it in the past, probably with SONAR at the time. Not sure why, but that prevented me from seeing whether getting Cubase to avoid that first CPU would make a similar difference.) My CPU is decidedly not one of the newer ones - it is i7-5820K @ 3.30 GHz.