The reason why Cubase doesn't dare to support HiDPI.

updated to cope with the fact what Daniel Spreadbury claimed: Only WaveLab and Dorico uses Qt.

Even without retina, Cubase still has serious UI graphic performance problem with hi-resolution screens (especially in combination with certain VST plugins like the Voxengo EQ shipped with Cubase). This is likely due to the current cross-platform framework which is unable to utilize GPU for UI rendering.

If Cubase wants to fully support Retina mode under macOS, they must find and apply a new solution FIRST to completely replace their current plan. OTHERWISE IT WILL LEAD TO EXTREMELY SERIOUS UI RESPONSIVENESS ISSUES.

I bet this process could take at least 5 years for Cubase (because they have to completely rewrite and retest the UI part for Cubase). Note that this respects to the fact that Cubase constantly adding new features per major upgrades.

According to the moderator “MRJJ” at Qt official forum, “Qt Quick + QML instead + C++ backend” could be used in this case: Rendering performance problems on iMac with Retina 5K | Qt Forum

Well isn’t Cubase getting rid of QT? The talk was just about making a new video engine, but if QT is pulling support for Windows then Steinberg will have to replace it altogether, no?

According to what Steinberg’s officials say, Qt is used in Dorico and not used in Cubase and Nuendo, that’s why Dorico supports HiDPI while Cubase and Nuendo do not.

And for what it’s worth, when I run Cubase 5 with HiDPI mode forced via executable’s properties in Windows 7, I don’t observe any performance issues, just GUI is too small and therefore unusable.

Don’t confuse Apple QuickTime with Qt (with the lowercase t) (C++ programming framework).

Thanks for your intel. Wondering why Daniel never did tell me this before. I just updated my original post.

These are two different things. The Qt Steinberg is getting rid of, is the outdated video-codec by Apple called ‘Quicktime’. The Qt that is used for the GUI is a platform independent software-framework https://www.qt.io/

Surely OpenGL is available and pretty much 100% compatible on both platforms?

The latest one is not. AFAIK the Metal is the best choice for macOS (since El Capitan).