Windows 7 vs Windows 8.1

Does anyone know if there any performance gains or losses with Cubase 8 Pro between 64-bit Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 ?

Thanks

I made this upgrade a while back. I’m glad I did. For me, I had less CPU spiking and since, Cubase has been running the most stable I’ve ever had it. I certainly won’t be upgrading to Win 10 for a long time as I don’t see the point at the minute. I always wait until an OS has had time for bugs to be fixed etc. It’s good to be an OS behind…

Updating to 8.1 does not make sense, now that win 10 is out. Waiting a bit for Steinberg to ok win10 does make sense.

Windows 8.1 has been fantastic for me with C8 but Windows 10 looks even better once the quirks get ironed out

For me with a song that maxed my VSTI performance meter ran at 50% on Win 8 with Cubase 8

Defo worth the upgrade IMHO


this at 64 bit

For me I am getting much better CPU efficiency under 8.1 than I did under 7 -

And in the main I don’t have any stability issues - and that’s using all kind of 3rd party plug ins and VSTs so I must be fortunate - but there we are - that’s my experience -

Sounds like 8.1 is worth a try… but having looked today, I can’t justify paying upgrade price of £189 GBP to move from 7 to 8.1

I assume Cubase 8 , at some point (soon hopefully!) will be compatible with Windows 10. I can upgrade to Windows 10 from 7 for free - but need to be sure Cubase 8 is truly compatible and works properly under 10. I also want to know I’m not going to suffer in terms of performance if I do upgrade.

At the moment, in the meantime, I want to upgrade to Windows 8.1 but not at £189, no way.

So, I guess I am stuck waiting for Steinberg to give the ‘all clear’ on Cubase 8 Pro and Windows 10.

I’m pretty sure Cubase will run on Windows 10 without problems. I would be more concerned with driver compatibility than with Cubase.

But that’s just me. :smiley:

I’m staying on Windows 7, this machine runs too well as it is to mess with it!

Hate to say this, but win 8.1 is looking better now. There is more to Win 10 than just fixing the defects in Win 8. Win 10 is designed to be an ever evolving system with enforced updates. For users of expensive photo, audio or video production software, we kind of like stability.

Eventually Cubase will work with Win 10, but what happens in 6 months when MS “improves” skype by making it own your audio interface? Who knows what could happen.

There is certainly a place for the new design of Win 10 in consumer computing, but the stability of Win 7 and 8 may be more desirable for media production.

Strictly speaking in terms of audio, many DAW benchmarks between Win 7 and Win 8 on the same hardware have shown little to no performance improvement in Windows 8… sometimes it’s even slightly worse. We’re talking 0-2% difference, in either direction.

I did some benchmarking for a review I wrote on the Intel NUC last year, and here were my scores between Win 7 and Win 8.1 for Cubase 7.5 DAWBench, Passmark Performance Test, and Windows Experience Index:

(Scores highlighted in green are better.)

Windows 8 boots faster and launches programs faster, but that’s it.

I’m waiting until Steinberg (and Roland) give Windows 10 the green light, and then I will do some benchmarking of my own on Win 10, but Windows 8 was an easy pass.

My experience is consistent with the previous post - Win8.1 performed slightly worse than Win7. My metric was number of pops/clicks in a project that used full orchestra tutti sections with a few synths. I run at 128 samples with one buffer for VE Pro to a slave over ethernet. I’m using Cubase 7.5.

I’m setting up a laptop and decided to try Win10 and it seems to perform the same as Win8.1 using the same metric under Cubase 7.5. I didn’t try Cubase 8.0.

Bottom line is that both Win10 and Win8.1 perform slightly worse than Win7 under the metric I mentioned above. However, there’s no practical difference that I can discern. You won’t produce fewer minutes of music a day because of the difference.

So it really doesn’t matter. Given that Win10 is free right now you might as well get it and make an install disk even if you don’t actually install it (Win7 won’t be around forever…). Of course, you have to first install over your existing OS in order to get your license key so that you can later do a clean install.

rgames

I strongly suggest that any win 7 user considering win 10, should first make a system image backup of win 7 before upgrading. Personally, I make an image to clone another OS disk, and then upgrade the clone. That way, I can simply swap disks to alternate between win 7 and win 10.

This is an excellent point, and that may lead me to stay with 7 or move to 8.1, even if it costs to upgrade. Stability is vital for me too, and enforced updates could make Win 10 incompatible with that need.