Nuendo record performance vs. PT

Hello,

Unfortunately that does not help with the many hardware and OS combinations we’ve tested (see above for list). It’s still mostly the same result when recording to external high quality drives using the same hardware -
Nuendo 5 + 6 have significantly reduced recording performance compared to PT 10 + 11 at high track counts.

Thanks trying,
Hugh

Hello,

I have some results that have solved our issue but still reveal the inefficiency in Nuendo for recording.

After several anecdotal and strange reports from operators I tested the following -
13 - Toshiba 500GB
4 - Toshiba 1TB
2 - Toshiba 2TB
4 - Seagate 7200.14
4 - Seagate 7200.12
2 - Seagate 7200.11
2 - Hitachi 2010 build date
2 - WD Black
2 - WD Blue
2 - OWC SSD 6Gb
3 - pcie flash

Systems tested -
MacPro tower OS10.6.8
MacPro tower OS10.8.5
2 - MacMini 2013 quad OS10.8.5 in Sonnet pcie chassis
MacMini 2013 quad OS10.8.5 in Magma pcie chassis
MacBookPro retina OS10.9.x
MacBookPro 2013 OS10.8.5
MacBookPro 2011 OS10.6.8

Interfaces tested -
Internal Sata where available
eSata where available
USB3 on all systems
Firewire on all systems

Test conditions - any interface available on a system was used for any drive available on that system. Most systems had all interfaces available.
A variety of enclosures were tested, it was verified that a particular brand was good, with a good drive performs well.
Each drive was tested multiple times to verify repeatability.
Nuendo 5.5.5, 5.5.6, 6.something, Logic Pro X.something, and ProTools 10.3.8/HDX2 were all tested.

Weird indeed.
The same model drives varied substantially in performance.
The Toshibas exhibited the worst performance, rarely succeeding above 70 tracks in Nuendo.
The Seagate 7200.x were fine with 128 tracks but oddly the dot12s performed a bit better than the dot11s or dot14s. Strange.
The Hitachis were good for 80 tracks and 112 tracks respectively, still not good.
The WD Blacks were good at 128 tracks, didn’t test them above that.
The WD Blues, suggested by our enclosure supplier, were good at 192 tracks on eSata and usb3 and 128 tracks on firewire.
The SSD and pcie flash were very good of course.

ProTools had no problem recording 128 tracks to any of these drives, even the 2 Toshibas that wouldn’t get to 64 tracks in Nuendo.

So the takeaway here is twofold -
First - drives are varying far too much; even if it benchmarks well it may not perform well in Nuendo, Logic, and other DAWs.
Second - my original point now borne out thoroughly - Nuendo has poor record performance compared to ProTools 10/11, a remarkable change from a few years ago. This should be examined.

Hugh

Wow.
Speechless… :confused:

This is interesting. I have never needed to record more than 32 channels at a time and Nuendo an PT were always up to the task but I have found that PT can’t keep up with Nuendo on playback with very high track counts (100+). This is with PT10 HD native.

Dean

It would be worth repeating the tests with Windows 7, to see if the results were the same.

DG

This must be a Mac thing.

I just loaded up 300 tracks and recorded without Nuendo breaking a sweat. (+/- 5% on the performance meter / buffer of 64 samples / Internal Audio Drive)
Next, I grabbed the closest USB-3 portable drive. Recorded 75 tracks seamlessly at 96/24 (buffer of 512 samples).

Hello,

I agree, would be interesting to see if the results are similar on Win7. As noted in my results the drive mechanisms vary far more than standard benchmarking would suggest so it’s necessary to use drives that do not perform well with Nuendo on the Mac.

Robin,
I agree, it’s probably a Mac thing and the way Nuendo queues recording information. Since PT 10/11 do it very well now (surprising as hell to me!) it indicates Nuendo is not doing it efficiently.

Hugh

Hugh, I agree with you.

I think PT is using the RAM of the machine much more effectively. They are probably buffering and storing the audio recording in RAM and then writing to the drive at a pace that the relevant media can handle. I’m surprised Steinberg aren’t doing the same thing, considering the amount of RAM we have available these days.

I’m not sure how secure the process is though. Perhaps you should look at Nuendo Live. It’s not expensive and from what I can gather is the most secure way for critical live recording. Even if there is a crash all of recorded audio up that point is secure.

Cheers,
Robin

Ultimately the hard drive will need to feed the ram or pull from the ram so there will be a time limit to how long ram buffering will work. This could really create a problem with a high track count recording where it starts off working well and then runs out of ram because the drive has reached its limit. The recording that you thought was working suddenly isn’t.

I remember the days of testing hard drives where measurements were always on my radar. It has essentially become a non issue for me now.
Dean

Hello,

Ultimately the hard drive will need to feed the ram or pull from the ram so there will be a time limit to how long ram buffering will work

I use the term “buffering” because it’s something everyone understands (and it’s a feature PT touts) - the ram doesn’t actually fill up. Every workstation buffers data on the way to the drive, some do it more efficiently than others. When recording multiple tracks most workstations write a part of Track 1, then write a part of Track 2, etc. up to in our case Track 192, then go back around to writing some more of Track 1. Our drive testing showed that Toshiba drives performed very badly at this and other mechanisms had varying levels of performance despite all these drives benchmarking well. Additionally PT does this much better than Nuendo without filling up the ram. This indicates two things - the drive write access is different between the two programs and is more efficient in PT, and that some drives do not deal well with the particular type of write access Nuendo is doing with large track counts.


Perhaps you should look at Nuendo Live.

Thanks for the recommendation. We’ve looked at Nuendo Live, I was one of the beta testers. There are several reasons why the product doesn’t work for us the most obvious is we need an actual daw. However in those situations where we’re just acquiring it does not work as advertised. If you read the NLive forum posts you’ll see several issues that make it not usable for us - inaccurate and variable timestamps, dropped samples on long recordings, varying file starts with prerecord on, “flexible” timeline making AAF imports not accurate, etc.


I hope Steinberg takes a look at the write performance in Nuendo, it is not efficient and I’m still amazed that PT 10/11 has improved write performance as much as they have; they used to be the worst at it.

Hugh

Correct on the buffering.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is safety. What happens when the system goes down for some reason? Is all, or some data lost? Or can you count on it that all the data, up to the crash, will be recoverable?
Needless to say that a safety system take up a good deal of performance too …

Fredo

There must be an X factor here some where. And not only the disk drive. I can without problems record 128 tracks at 64 samples latency with Nuendo in OS X 10.9.2

Hello psvennevig,

As can we - as long as we’re using one of several drives we’ve demonstrated as doing well - Seagate 7200.x, WD Blue, WD Black; I’m sure there are others that do well. However I’m betting you’re not recording 128 tracks to a recent generation Toshiba mechanism, we’ve demonstrated to Avastor and others the repeatability of this. The interesting thing to me is whether it occurs on a Win7 Nuendo machine as well and the only way to test that is for us to send a Win7/multi-madi user one of our 23 Toshiba mechanisms that have tested badly.

Hello Fredo,

I used to freak out PT users by demonstrating that you could pull the power on Nuendo during recording and get most of it back. I haven’t tested that in a while…

Hugh

When going from 5.5 to N6 I definitely had some hard drive issues. There were a couple of songs that I could not port over because of it and Nuendo 6 seemed to take a little more time to catch up when scrolling around with high track count projects.

This was the thread around the issue. It was never really addressed.

Hugh, the interesting thing is that you were testing N5.5 and N6 and found the same thing more or less.

I have not had any more of the show stopper issues with N6 so it hasn’t been a problem since then.

Dean

Only drives I use are: WD Black, HGST Enterprise and different SSDs.

I don’t think I’ve seen a Toshiba disk for years.

Pål

I would like to just chime in that N6 is beautiful but seems to be slower to export and just run with a bit higher VST than say N5 and it must have to do with the visual overhaul. The safety factor is there but I think most people would agree they are using a UPS in studio. I would like there to be preferences to scale Nuendo 6 back again. I find it works nicely on my older quad core computers but the CPU usage is definitely greater. I use RAIDing and don’t have any disk speed performance issues. I think it’s a major change under the hood.


Josh

ASIO guard is using cpu. Turn it off and you’ll see CPU load like in N5.5. However you won’t have the security of ASIO guard.

Pål

Does ASIO guard protect the export audio mixdown function? Would hyperthreading introduce clicks and pops into the tracks?

My tests show a difference of about 4 minutes with a 50 minute 5.1 mix with several stems.

On some computers hyper thread can be a mess yes. On new Macs you should turn of HT.
Use the app “Instruments” to do this. Instruments comes with the free download Xcode.

Pål