I just ran the DAWbench test using Waves Kramer Master Tape (160 instances) and to my surprise, Windows Resource Monitor showed all cores fully loaded and the overall CPU load up to 98%. I also see the ‘Active Core Count’ go to 6 (i.e. all cores). This shows it’s definitely possible for Cubase to take full advantage of multiple cores.
However, In a typical real world project, my CPU use might be at 50% or less when the ASIO is maxed out. I think it depends a lot on exactly what plugins your are running and/or how things are routed. I’ve seen it suggested that using lots of group channels and complex routing can add to the ASIO load in Cubase. No idea of this is true but if I find some time I might investigate this as I tend to use quite a lot of groups/routing.
And for anyone who is interested, I kept a record of when I ran the same DAWbench test on my old i7 920 setup and it could run 82 Kramer Tape instances. Bearing in mind that my i7 920 was overclocked by about 50% from stock speed, these results are roughly in line with what one would expect from looking at their ‘CPU Mark’ benchmark scores.
