Real Time Performance and the role of CPU

Hey folks,

since more and more posts come up with performance questions about the right number of CPU cores for the best DAW performance, I thought I’d share this little video with you guys. It explains in a very good way the impact of the CPU on the real time performance of a DAW.

Video

A little spoiler: it doesn’t really matter. The bottle neck of the system which lead to performance issues are the bridges which connect other services like video, USB, harddrive etc. If they are slow and lock the CPU up with their own tasks, the CPU hast to wait for the requests to be finished to process another task like the audio material. This leaves the CPU mostly waiting even though there would be plenty enough of performance left and the CPU can’t handle the audio material within the buffer time, which leads to drop outs. But see for yourself.

m8 this is the first stickied post on the forum…

Thanks Eneco. That was very interesting information.

To the moderators: Please do not move this post to a “junk” forum, such as the Steinberg Lounge, where nobody will see it, despite the fact that it’s not Cubase/Nuendo specific. I think this video is important enough to be included in the announcement sections on the Cubase/Nuendo forums. Or at least be made a “sticky”. The video answers questions regarding performance problems made in numerous postings.

That’s why they already made it a sticky and why Trevelyen said so in the post before yours :confused: