Worth adding a GFX card with a 7950x for cubase 13/spectralayers 11 etc

Cubase
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Just wondering if adding a decent gfx card will make any performance difference to Cubase 13 over the on board gfx on the 7950x? I heard Spectralayes like an 8GB GFX card, not sure if Supervision and various plugins and the overall GUI of C13 would benefit .

M

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A dedicated graphics card is generally preferable to an embedded one. This applies to the system in general, but also to Cubase. Although suitable for embedded graphics cards, Steinberg recommends AMD R or RX series and later or NVIDIA Series 700 and later. Many messages in the forum regarding performance problems turn out to be bottlenecks in graphics processing. So my personal answer is yes.

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thanks, Iā€™ll drop an AMD RX7600 in then and see how it goes.

Iā€™m looking forward to dropping a new 9950x in when they come out soonā€¦ I might do the 2 things at the same time for big smiles :slight_smile:
M

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In my experience, it isnā€™t Cubase that requires the GPU muscle, itā€™s some plugins, for me specifically, Waves and Unfiltered Audio.

  1. Long time ago I had an issue with Waves whereby I added ā€œone more instanceā€ and then ALL instances of every Waves plugin had a blank white window. Remove any instance, and things were back to normal. I was using Intel graphics, so I bought the cheapest GPU I could find, problem solved.
  2. Unfiltered Audio used to use OpenGL, I believe, which caused havoc with the whole system. But at least the setting could be turned off. I think they fixed that problem.

Now Iā€™m into gaming so Iā€™ve got a butch GPU.

PS
AMD GPU software is the best!

5

Just to be clear: At this moment nothing in Cubase benefits from a powerful graphics card. There is no AI stuff going on in Cubase. None of the plugins from Steinberg use that either.
Only SpectralLayers 10 or higher makes use of the AI capabilities in certain graphic cards and then only, as far as I know, for stem seperation. So if you use that a lot a high end graphic card might be helpful. For everything else you can use older and cheaper models.

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Thanks I had a feeling that may be the case. So would you say Iā€™ll see no benefit at all from using a GFX card over the onboard ?

M

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If youā€™re interested search Gearspace for maybe Pete (Scan) or TAFKATā€™s comments on this. I think I asked about this before but maybe it was a different issue.

Basically the ā€˜worryā€™ has been that the iGPU uses system memory which means some resources has to be dedicated to that. The other worry was heat generation taking capacity from the CPU. So the argument Iā€™ve seen was that itā€™s not so much that graphic work is more efficient on a dedicated GPU but rather that not using the iGPU frees up some minor amount of resources for the CPU.

This was within the last year that it was discussed I think.

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If you use more than 1 monitor, or if your 1 monitor is big (eg 49 inches), or you work in 4K, then get a new GPU. Your 7600 should be fine.
Otherwise, stick with the onboard.

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yep I kind f remember this and itā€™s been in the back of my mind. That all makes sense.

I think Iā€™ll do it just to see whatā€™s what, whatever happens it wonā€™t be ā€˜worseā€™

M

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10

For Spectralayers, a decent GFX will make a difference, I got the NVidia 4070, for Cubase, nothing from what I could tell.

So I did a test using Spectralayers 11.0.10 Pro, my system is AMD 5950X with 64GB of RAM (3600 MHz) and NVidia 4070 (MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X OC 12GB GDDR6X).

Unmixing an MP3 192 kbps, 3:36 mins long with ā€œExtremeā€ quality selected, everything ticked to unmix apart from Sax and Brass (the track doesnā€™t contain any), results are:

CPU: 7:40 (460 secs)
GFX: 1:17 (77 secs)

Nearly 6 times faster using the mid-range GFX than a beast of a CPU, which Iā€™m sure youā€™ll agree, the 5950X is!

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