This is not a very scientific test, and is only on a small project, but for me an example of real usage. I’ve been working on a project in C7 using Pianoteq, Kontakt 4 with four stringed instruments loaded (reverb disabled), and Reverence as a send effect. With all five instruments playing sustained 4 note chords, CPU was showing 36% split across the two CPUs (i.e. 18% on each core).
Curious to see how this compared to the “native” Mac DAWs I created identical projects in Logic Pro and Digital Performer 8 (the demo version), and loaded the C7 project in Cubase 6.5. I got the following figures:-
Logic 48%
DP 8 47%
C6.5 44%
I tested each one with its built in reverb (Space Designer in Logic and Proverb in DP), but also with IK Multimedia’s CSR Hall reverb, which only made about 1% difference in each case. To make it fair (no cheating Logic!) I set the buffer sizes to 1024.
I know it’s only a small project but I was impressed at the performance of C7, which confirmed the feeling I was getting. The big BUT of course is that the figure for C7 is for before the CPU spike hit. There’s also the issue of VST vs AU (Logic and DP).
That was my experience as well. C7 seems to perform great on my MacBook UNTIL the spike happens. Because of the spikes I’ve had to roll back to 6.5. Hoping a fix is around the corner! It won’t be in 7.04 but Hedge said maybe we’ll see it in 7.05.
