I’ve been around computers for over 30 years, so I know my fair share when it comes to them and their components. So this may very well be a stupid question, but I can’t get it out of my head.
For over a decade now, we have seen the field of GPUs (Graphic Processing Unit for those who don’t speak nerd) take over more and more functions from the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and make amazing leaps in performance, not just for games, but for video editing, 3D rendering and so many other things that involve computer graphics of any kind.
For example, if you’re a video editor, it used to be that you would need the latest and greatest machine, Mac or PC, to be able to edit video even in HD, but the huge advances in GPU technology mean that these days you can have a machine that is from 2012, add a $200 Nvidia RTX card and you can edit 4K video just fine. You can also render that video at speeds that your old machine by itself would take a year to do the same.
But when it comes to MIDI programming, even the latest and greatest is not enough for a totally smooth playback if you’re working on a project with 50 or so tracks, and heavy sampled libraries like OT Berlin Strings. Obviously a lot of this depends on the engine, and a bad engine can bring down the best DAW, but generally speaking, even with the fastest Mac or PC, with the fastest NVMe drives and so on, you still get hiccups until you have played the song or section several times.
So I guess my question is, for those of you who know Cubase but also all the super geeky tech stuff, there isn’t anything for MIDI programming that would be equivalent to the GPU for video editing, right? Like a PCIe card that has an “APU” (Audio Processing Unit), and offloads some of the processing?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no, and if it is, who wants to make one? Just kidding, but I bet if someone had the brains to come up with a card like that, they would make good money on it. Well, not as much as Nvidia, but still good money.
I’m editing to clarify something. I suppose an APU would be a good idea for everything that involves Cubase and other DAWs. I just mentioned MIDI programming specifically because it’s the thing that really puts a lot of strain for Cubase. I was working on a project that was 8 minutes long and had like 130 tracks, and was barely playable on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra, which is a very fast machine. Even disabling all the inserts and FX, it was still a nightmare. So I worked the MIDI part as much as I could without worrying about the sound tweaking.
When I was done, I used the excellent feature Cubase has that lets you export a project doing a mixdown of each individual track and placing all the tracks in the new project. Once it did that, the new project was a breeze. I was piling up audio effects like there’s no tomorrow, Soundtoys, FabFilter, Steinberg, Cinematic Rooms Pro, Plugin Alliance, Waves, bit of everything. And yet, pressing the spacebar kept playing without any hiccups even with 130 tracks and FX in almost all of them, plus the groups and the FX tracks. So the bottleneck is in the MIDI, and it makes sense. Whereas one track has to load one audio file and play it back with effects added, a VSTi MIDI track has to load thousands of tiny audio files that will be triggered with each MIDI note. That, times 130, obviously is going to cause a lot strain on any CPU.