hi its our old friend dongle protection all those calls take resources you cant start with dongle in then remove it after cubase has loaded do therefore it must be checking constantly as you say reaper isnt protected yet 5x more efficient hmmm
anyone from steinberg care to comment
I have been tinkering around and so far:
- disabled UAD (no difference)
- Pulled out iLok (no difference)
- Uninstalled Cubase and reinstalled (no difference)
It does seem to boil down to several plugins especially S-Gear.
in Cubase S-gear alone uses 25% CPU on the Cubase meter and about 15-18% on the Windows CPU meter with the bulk on Core 0
in Reaper, S-gear alone uses 3% CPU on the Reaper meter and about 5-6% on the Windows CPU meter evenly distributed across the cores.
Have you tried putting S gear on a regular audio track insert? Reaper doesn’t have FX tracks.
Seriously I’ve never needed to use a buffer size that large, you should be able to run at 128 no problem with a project that small. Are you sure none of your plugins are the 32 bit versions running bridged without you realising?
The ASIO metre in Cubase isn’t directly related to the windows performance meter, as you see loading just 1 core will make the ASIO meter rise because overloading just 1 core will give you an audio dropout.
Just thinking off the top of my head here 
MC
Thanks for the reply. S gear is definitely the 64 bit version. For testing purposes I tried it both as an insert and as an insert on an fx channel. I usually use the fx channel because it’s a stereo effect and my guitar tracks are usually mono.
I know the Cubase ASIO performance meter hit is real because I’ll start getting crackling at around 80 percent. Other plug-ins like guitar rig use negligible amounts of cpu. What’s odd with s gear is that I get similar cpu hit at any latency 256 and above.
Anyone on this thread using sgear?
I have a similar issue using brainworx rock rack pro.
I installed the demo of studio one pro last night as well. In Studio One s gear uses about 16 percent on the performance meter. Not as good as reaper, but better than Cubase.
Of course, Sgear is my favorite guitar plug in. I’ve used Cubase for what seems like 20 years, I really have no desire to use other software in conjunction with Cubase, but it’s tough needing to freeze everything when needing to work on one or two tracks.
Mine runs a little above average, but I cannot notice during playback or writing… Meaning, it does not skip or cause any issue above seeing the meter being high… Maybe my situation is odd.
Have you compared the ASIO and Task Manager cpu consumption of other plugins in Cubase 7.5 and Reaper to see if everything on Reaper is only using a third of what Cubase uses?
If its just S-Gear then it could possibly be some specific quirk with Cubase thats causing the excessive cpu uage and might be worth contacting them about it.
Also have you tried installing an older version of Cubase like 5.5 and compared with that?
One last point, are you at least able to run at lower ASIO latency with Reaper? If you find even with Reaper at 256 sample latency that things start falling apart very quickly, that would indicate somethings definitely wrong in your system somewhere. That would then be a good time to download and run LatencyMon and see what might be hogging the system in the background.
As much as I love Cubase 7.5, that is one thing I sinply don´t understand.
I just built a new 4770 machine with 32GB Ram, and I was able to get the ASIO load to almost maximum in a popsong production I finished the other day…
I then made the test and took the whole thing over to Sonar X2, made an omf file for the audio, inserted the same vsti´s and plugs, took a while to do that but I wanted to know if there´s a difference, and
sorry to tell you guys but Sonar could handle that project a lot easier…
Latency Monitor on my system is between 60-80 when not running Cubase. When I launch Cubase it goes to about 500. I am very fanatical with tuning my system. I sold my firewire interface because the firewire card doubled my dpc latency score and went with rme USB.
Thats fine then, don’t bother running LatencyMon with other software like the DAW also running its designed to run standalone.
Have you compared other plugins besides S-Gear cpu consumption in Cubase 7.5 vs Reaper, are you seeing similar x3 multiple cpu usage?
I am going through a bunch of plugins
High 20%+ one instance
s-gear is the worst offender in Cubase
rock pro
Tracks EQ 73, 81, Master Channel 532
MID CPU useage 10-15% per instance
UHE Satin its about 15% of one instance
Waves CLA Drums hits about 10%
NI Passive EQ
Kush Pusher
Then I have tons of plugins with neglible CPU
Many Waves
Voxengo
NI plugins
Valhalla reverbs
So the good news is the problem isn’t across the board, but rather certain plugins give Cubase fits where they give Reaper none and Studio One somewhere in between.
FYI On Cubase 5.5 32-bit, 1 instance of U-He Satin @44khz project sample rate uses 7% cpu in task manager and about same % in ASIO meter, but thats on my old i7 920 runing at 2.7ghz. That you’re using double that with a 3.5ghz 3770K shows quite a difference.
I actually have 7.5 now but still need to install it on my new 4790K system. I have same audio interface as you the RME UFX, I’ll report back with what cpu levels I’m seeing. Might install Cubase 5.5 alongside 7.5 on the new PC as well to check the differences.
Satin build 2457 - one instance on an insert at 512 - 2048 samples is actually about 12.5 ASIO CPU and between 8-10 Windows task manager. Odd how ASIO performance doesn’t change until going down to 128.
Ok , I get the I can’t believe I did this award. While troubleshooting this further, I was looking at CPU Z and saw that my pc was running at 1.6 ghz. I went into the bios and checked that speedstep and turbo weren’t on, etc and I’m still at 1.6. My gigabyte mobo has an LN-2 physical switch that is meant to throttle down an extreme over clock that I must have hit by accident while last juggling my uad2 card! So low and behold, my pc all of a sudden has a lot more asio power when it is actually running at its full speed!!!
Well that seems to be an issue as well. My DPC hovers around 20-40us without Cubase and 175-250us with heavy tracks playing at 88.2kHz.
What type of connection does your PC make to your audio interface?
If it is firewire, trying using the legacy firewire win 7 drivers not the default win 7 firewire drivers.