Significant Difference in Nuendo Project Load Times Between Mac and Windows

Nuendo
1

Hello everyone,

I’m currently working on a film project that involves a large Nuendo session with 27,222 WAV files in the Media Pool, totaling 422GB of audio data.
Please note that this is only temporary production recording material — the project size will continue to grow as post-production progresses.

When opening this project, I’m observing a major discrepancy in load times between platforms:

  • Windows systems: approx. 5 minutes
  • MacBook Air M4 (32GB unified memory / 2TB SSD): 20 seconds

I have mainly relied on Windows systems for professional work due to overall performance, but in this particular case — dealing with such a high file count — I was surprised to see that the latest Mac hardware is significantly faster at loading the project.

Environment:

Software

  • Nuendo 14.0.32

Windows Systems

  • System1
    • Custom PC
    • CPU: Intel Ultra9 285K
    • RAM: 64GB (DDR5)
    • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti
    • System Disk: NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
    • Work Disk: NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
  • System2
    • Custom PC
    • CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K
    • RAM: 64GB (DDR4)
    • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti
    • System Disk: NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
    • Work Disk: NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
  • System3
    • Intel NUC 12 Extreme
    • CPU: Intel Core i9-12900
    • RAM: 64GB (DDR4)
    • GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060
    • System Disk: NVMe Gen4 SSD (2TB)
    • Work Disk: NVMe Gen3 SSD (2TB)
  • System 4 (ASUS Vivobook S15 S5507QA, ARM Windows)
    I had hoped this device could eventually be a viable option, but at present it’s far from usable.
    Nuendo took over 10 minutes attempting to launch the project and then crashed. Unfortunately, ARM Windows is not yet ready for professional use.

macOS

  • MacBook Air M4
    • 32GB Unified Memory
    • 2TB SSD

My Questions:

Despite using the exact same project file, the massive difference in load time makes me wonder:

  • Could this be due to differences in file I/O architecture or optimization between macOS and Windows?
  • Are there recommended system settings or practices to improve project loading performance on Windows (e.g., disabling indexing, excluding Nuendo folders from antivirus scanning, SSD tuning, etc.)?

Although macOS currently shows an impressive performance in this specific scenario, I still find Windows systems with dedicated GPUs superior for tasks like SpectraLayers processing and intensive graphical work, so I am not considering switching to Mac entirely at this point.

If anyone here has experience using Nuendo across both Mac and Windows environments, or has faced similar issues, I would really appreciate your insights or suggestions.

And if this behavior indicates a fundamental performance flaw on Windows versions of Nuendo, I sincerely hope Steinberg can investigate and address it.

Thank you very much for your time and support.

1 Like
2

Try lowering RAM timings. That might help a bit.
And yes disabling antivirus program may help but it depends. If you’re just using windows defender then it’s most likely making no difference since win defender does not affect much on load time or other performance perspectives.
Project loading is exactly way faster on my macs compared to my win PCs, too.

BTW As for GPU performance you mentioned, Apple M4 (10 core GPU) gets only the performance capability near RTX 3050 Laptop. So it is nowhere comparable to a dedicated GPU such as 5060ti. Also I find that, at least in my workflow, bottleneck for SL displaying spectral is often on the CPU side (running FFT on multi threads) rather than GPU. 12900 and 285k have way more cores and way faster overall speed than a passive cooling M4 in this regard.

1 Like
3

There are many things that could be causing this. It could be your antivirus settings, a device driver issue, a licensing/authentication delay for some plugin, some other kind of OS issue, configuration, regression, driver, service, or plugin conflict, even a file system error that is causing a time out, adding unexpected delay but not outright crashing your system. Network issues and cloud-related issues are notorious for causing lag as well, if that is in any way related to your system, backups, authentications, licensing, remote files, network drives, etc… there are SO many possible culprits!

One painful recent example - reverse from what you are experiencing, it was on a Mac, and Windows worked far better for me. I had a very hard to find corrupt file issue on some audio files in a huge project with various sampler instances, where I had thousands of files, and it took forever to load the project, but what I didn’t realize at the time was, that the file system was trying to access some of the files and kept retrying and retrying before finally continuing but it didn’t fatally time out. A very weird file system issue in this case. It took me a LONG time to figure it out. I’m not saying that’s your problem in your current situation, but don’t be surprised if it’s just some very minor sneaky little issue like that. In the end, I discovered there was a minor corruption on my project hard drive affecting a small range of files, and I had to restore a backup to a new, freshly formatted hard drive to get the project to load up normally again. I nearly pulled my hair out from stress trying to diagnose the problem… again… on a Mac. Something odd can happen on either platform. (I now no longer use Macs unless an emergency for some Mac-only app BTW).

I’ve also personally had network timeout issues with mounted network drives, driver conflicts, OS update issues, antivirus conflicts, on both platforms. And more over the years.

So drill down into the details and look at the OS version, the devices, drivers, AV settings, plugins, etc., along with all the versions. If you take a patient scientific approach, there’s a good chance you’ll find the culprit. Post the details here and maybe someone can replicate the issue for you. You might have found a bug that affects all of us… or maybe it’s just unique to your system and/or session.

A helpful approach I often do in these situations is I build out a fresh “test” project step by step from scatch, plugin by plugin, track by track, saving versions along the way, checking performance, etc., until I can replicate the issue, and I USUALLY find the culprit.

Good luck!

2 Likes
4

Try adding the folder containing the project to the:
Windows Security
Virus & threat protection
Virus & threat protection settings
Exclusions list.

Mike

3 Likes
5

Thank you so much, @Michael_Slater.
I tried what you suggested, and it worked perfectly.
This was exactly what I was trying to figure out — I’m really satisfied with the result!

I truly appreciate your help!

1 Like
6

No worries, Useful to do the same for big AAF imports as well.

2 Likes