I know this is an older thread but I wanted to briefly give my recent experience with the combination of an Nvidia graphics card and Cubase 8.
For the last 5 years, I’ve been running an extremely stable AMD Athlon FX 6-core system with an Asus motherboard and a Radeon 6670 video card. It has served me well but certain plugins were impossible to run at low latencies, like Diva in great or divine mode. And it was showing its age with large projects as well.
So I decided to upgrade and I bought a brand new Asus Z97 Pro motherboard and an i7 CPU. I also bought a Nvidia GT730 video card. I always buy fanless cards since the computer is in the studio with me and I need it to be whisper quiet.
Long story short; I was getting random dropouts in Cubase, even with projects consisting of only one track, no matter the latency setting. I tried using different drivers for my firewire card (a TI-based SIIG card that received high marks from other DAW users), turning off Hyper-Threading, uninstalling and re-installing various drivers, changing the power scheme so everything was running 100%, running DLC and other test programs to trace the fault, etc. It was a multi-day ordeal, trying to understand why this new system, which is much more powerful than my old one, was experiencing dropouts when it was using only a fraction of it’s processing power.
I ran across this thread about issues with Nvidia and took the suggestion to roll back the driver. That did not help either. But what I did notice is that if I minimized Cubase, so I couldn’t see any part of it on the desktop but it was still running, with audio coming from the speakers… I had NO dropouts. It was only when Cubase was on screen, when the graphics were being rendered and displayed, that the dropouts occurred.
So I uninstalled all the drivers for the GT730 and physically removed the card from my system. I hooked my screens to the onboard Intel graphics and… no dropouts. Only when I started opening Chrome windows and playing around on the internet did I start to get interruptions in the audio.
I then installed my old Radeon 6670 card, loaded the drivers, and I’m again experiencing no dropouts, not even when surfing the web, running FB, downloading and uploading files (at the same time), and chatting on IM. This is at 96kHz/24bit with the lowest latency my audio interfaces support (64s).
I don’t know why but it appears that Cubase 8 has issues with Nvidia. I would recommend using Radeon cards or if you don’t need a lot of GPU power for games and such, just using the graphics on your motherboard.