Score Editor blows VST performance thru the roof

I’ve got a project with no Audio Tracks and 9 Instrument Tracks (one VSTi each) along with a Reverence FX channel and a couple of group channels. Overall pretty modest size. Then I opened the Score Editor in non-page mode for a single track to read lyrics during playback. Suddenly I’m getting all sorts of audio artifacts. So I open the VST Performance meter and sure enough the peak meter is jumping around in the 80-100% range. If I close the Score Editor (or even minimize it, it turns out) everything goes back to normal and the VST peak meter is somewhere under 5%. If I make the Score window visible again performance goes in the tank, minimize it and everything is OK.

Anybody got an idea of what’s going on? Granted displaying the score is going to use some additional resources, but my graphics card should be handling the bulk of that. I’ve tried switching ASIO guard off and also setting it to high but that had minimal if any effect.

Which graphics card and driver do you have?

I’ve noted similar performance spikes and niggles when a lot of Cubase windows are active graphically. I’ll try the score editor when I am back at the DAW to see if it does the same thing.

My setup is a NVIDIA GTX970 with the driver version 350.12 (latest).

Thankfully I’m not hitting a real time performance limit but it is a little frustrating to see that meter jump up and down some 50% for no good reason - thankfully I can close that window!

The same video as you, as indicated in my signature (hint, hint). :wink:

I’ve played around with it some more and discovered something strange. If while this is happening I mute and then un-mute any channel performance returns to normal - although the use of audio resources should be the same before & after the mute/un-mute. This occurs even if the channel I change isn’t playing anything when I do this. But then if I minimize and maximize the score window, or even re-size it the problem returns. So I’m guessing the initial painting of the window at a specific size is what messes up performance.

At least I can clear it up now via the mute button, but what’s happening isn’t right. I hope it isn’t an artifact of the GTX970. Anyone else seeing this with different graphics cards?

ahh sigs, I really must get a new forum reader so I don’t keep making the mistake of not looking at the info people provided already (my reader doesn’t show sigs). :wink:

I don’t think its the 970 per se, I swapped it out for my son’s 770 and it exhibits the same issue. Also the fact you can mute and unmute to change the behaviour suggests to me there’s something peculiar in the overall behaviour. Even went all the way back to my original GTX670 and original driver which we all performing flawlessly with my earlier installation - it still had the same behaviour on the new install (done just after changing to the GTX970).

Looking through all the various ASIO performance issues people are talking about there does appear to be a sensitivity to installation order, Cubase state (your mute/unmute state change is just one I’ve seen), which windows and plugins are drawing on screen.

I am hoping Steinberg are seeing all the varied reports and diagnosing an optimisation/fix. It’s exceptionally difficult to log an issue report when it kinda works.

The most maddening part is there are no viable diagnostics to tell you WHY the ASIO meter is peaking. Latencymon and DPC checker both show very good results in my system. It is only when the realtime path is active that I apparently have this problem and it appears to be a spike need, not a sustained one.

Anyone from Steinberg got a diagnostic mode or tool I can run that will tell me why it’s spiking?

I’m reluctant to replace a perfectly good graphic card without diagnostics saying it is quite specifically that, or the UR44 USB, or the motherboard, or the …?? the fact the old hardware configuration no longer behaves with the current installation really does confuse things.

Yeah if you can’t specify a set of steps that will recreate the problem it’s tough to flag it.

I only very marginally suspect the graphics card might be involved because since that is something in common between our systems, and the problem is somehow related to displaying the score.

I had this happen again today. But the little trick I’d discovered of muting and then un-muting a track didn’t fix it.

However when, with the score still open, I opened a part in the Key Editor and then closed it. That set the performance back to normal. :question: WEIRD :question:

Does it still happen in Cubase safe start mode?

Good idea. But unfortunately problem remained in safe start mode.

Have you unloaded VSTs and reloaded one by one (Or the disable half method?)

Since I can make it go away fairly easily I don’t want to spend too much effort debugging unless it gets worse. Mostly curious if other folks are seeing this happen too - judging by the response it would seem not.

It only occurs after a change to the score window (modifying size, minimizing & then restoring, or even just opening it). But if a project starts with the Score window already open performance is normal. Also while all the VSTi’s I’ve looked at experience a huge performance hit, only a couple of resource hungry ones max out at 100% and are audible. The others may jump up into the 75-90% range but the audio is not impacted.