Hello,
I am a long time, over 20 years, cubase user and I love the program. I am not quick to complain but now I feel I have to. I hear a lot about Reapers CPU performance and thought, no way there is a big difference. People must be doing something wrong, to many buses etc etc. But I thought I will give it a try anyway. I work mainly with vsti’s so I set up a simple project with U-he Diva’s. With six Diva’s playing a seventh one caused dropouts and was not usable any more. At any buffersize (I have a RME PCI card). Asio meter was already at 95% with the six diva’s so no surprise. But CPU load was only in the 50-60%. I did not use any FX sends or buses.
Now Reaper. the same project gave the same cpu load (exact) and reaper has no asio meter so no idea what would happen if I added the seventh. Played fine and I could add to 10 divas. I could even add some vstfx and an fx send with a heavy cpu (relatively) load. Now the project was running in the 95% region occasionally 100%. But still playing. Display became sluggish, but that is expected at 100% cpu. But no dropouts or crashes.
This is a massive 50% increase (keeping it positive 60% to 90% is 50%, plugin wise it is 6 to 10 is 66% increase).
I have 4 cores at 4ghz so I would need 6 cores at 4ghz to equal that, if cubase uses the cores proportionally, that is.
I also tried some accustica aqua plugins. on the master bus. On cubase they are almost unusable in heavier projects and have render problems too and need realtime export. They worked fine in reaper.
So, I am not looking for advice like get a new computer (And my system is already very optimised. It scores as expected in DAWbench.)
I just want to know if Steinberg is planning a different approach to cpu processing. Not one that makes a few % difference but a real 50% increase in situations like this. If I am missing something, like if we do something like reaper, we will lose…I am interested too.
Hoping for the best!
I feel with you, but since this is a USER Forum and not a place where you can expect answers from Steinberg, the posting is welcome but useless.
It will only create again these loooong discussions about “check the reaper” (haha) or StudioOne, etc. etc. which the forum is recently flooded with.
haha I have just deleted my old comment ))) where I was covering Cubase’s ass
It was a huge discovery that Cubase can handle only 8 Divas 
OK, the benchmark. All Divas play C2 C3 C4 at default patch
Cubase 10 - 8 Divas without drop outs
FL Studio 20 - 4 Divas without drop outs but it can handle 20 Divas (I tired copying it) and still CPU is under 70% and you can hear the sound. In compare with Cubase where it can’t do any sounds at all. 
Reaper 5.981 - can’t say it impressed me. 4 Divas without drop outs. Any more - as terrible as Cubase.
I must say I am surprised. Of all these soft I thought FL would be the most retarded. But it won. Lmao 
I don’t its workflow though. And it’s not good with playing audio without drop outs. Cubase sounds well and then stutter for some tiny time. FL just produces artifacts all the time. And also I have pretty old laptop.
When doing this test the important is the realtime behaviour. So you need to specify your latency, and you need to trigger the notes from outside of cubase so it can not cheat! I doubt that reaper has the smart cheat that cubase do for non realtime tasks.
And also I have pretty old laptop.
Probably not the best machine for performance testing.