Very strange performance/CPU problems with C14 and 13900k

Cubase
,
1

I’m having very strange performance problems with Cubase 14 and hope someone can help.

I have a very powerful PC, but it happens very frequently that playing just one single instrument causes the peak display in the Audio Performance Monitor to go haywire and I get clicks and pops.

The weird thing is that this isn’t always the case. Simply switching buffer sizes briefly can solve it (e.g. going from 512 to 256 and immediately back to 512). I also had it happen a few times that the issue just disappeared from one second to the next without me touching anything.

My specs:

  • W11
  • i9-13900k
  • RTX 4090
  • 192GB RAM
  • RME Babyface Pro FS

BIOS is up to date, as are firmware and drivers for the Babyface. I have core parking turned off, disabled WLAN and bluetooth in the device manager. I know of the issues with the latest intel chips, but I don’t have any weird crashes/BSODs that would indicate that my CPU has taken a hit before the BIOS update that supposedly fixed the problem. The intel diagnostics tools also hasn’t found any issues.

I tried all different ASIO guard settings, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference. Steinberg Audio Power scheme is turned on.

Another weird thing: If I try running Latencymon while this is happening, the performance falls over completely, with the crackling getting more and more intense, until it reaches a point where I can’t even hear the instrument anymore. Then, even if I stop playing the instrument for 30 seconds or so and start playing again, it still crackles like crazy. Once I stop recording in Latencymon, the crackling is gone immediately.
In Latencymon itself I don’t see any warnings. I think the stats aren’t great but it still says that my PC should be fine for audio work.

Does anyone know what’s happening here? Grateful for any advice.

2

Are you using the NVIDIA Studio driver?

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3

Are you able to identify any differences in the LatencyMon results when you run it by itself compared to running it while you are working in Cubase ? To help potentially pin point a potential problematic driver.

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4

I have kind of the same issues and I use Nvidia Studio drivers, there is any known problem with studio driver? I actually thought that it will be better without all the other stuff for games that I don’t need on my studio.

5

The NVIDIA Studio driver is the best choice for DAW use.

7

I have similar problem with NVIDIA Studio driver + 16 core AMD CPU when I’m using built-in audio codec. Just one instrument is enough to cause overload.

8

I just read some other posts that suggested to go with older versions of the drivers (since I had the latest studio driver) but I still get spikes on an empty new project. So I really don’t know how to solve this, anyone have a different solution ? (everything is updated, from bios/drivers/latest everything)

9

Did you try DAW alternatives like Reaper, just to make sure that it’s not Cubase fault? It’s free for 60 days.

10

I’d say that’s the first thing to look at.

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11

Nobody can help unless you provide enough information – a short description of the hardware you are using (mainboard, exact CPU, RAM, GPU, exact OS version etc.)

12

I have same problem . clean install win 11 - asio guard is spiking in empty project . in cubase 13 everything works fine

13

The best choice is to use NV Clean Install to make a bloat free driver installer. After that run DDU to remove all nVidia components from the system and finally install drivers using the installer created with NV Clean Install.

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14

Agreed. Having avoided NVIDIA until very recently, I added a 3050 and encountered audio problems immediately that were only solved by uninstalling with DDU and doing a clean, minimal install of the graphics driver from the Studio package.

Thanks for the tip about NV Clean Install.

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