Upgraded to Mac 12-core, have same ASIO/CPU in Cubase

In_Stereo · November 8, 2016, 11:50pm

Laserkraft:

I talked to a DAW hardware specialist from scan.co.uk.
In short:

All DAWs he knows, treat multi core realtime processing basically in the same way.

A single channel and all it’s subsequent routing is always handled in a single thread by a single core (so single core performance and speed are the bottleneck if you have channels with demanding VSTis or VST FX).

If your project’s load is less concentrated on (few) channels with very demanding plug-ins but rather has a big channel count, then you will benefit from having more cores, since all the different tracks can be handled in separate threads and thereby be assigned to different cores.

This generally applies to realtime processing in Audio. Non-realtime applications such as 3D rendering are different and the single core performance is less important.

There are also articles on processor choise in the Steinberg Knowledge base and in the Ableton online help to support this.

Huh. Well I recently came from Pro Tools (and sometimes Reaper) to Cubase 8.5 and immediately I noticed that it got knocked out far earlier than PT would. I’m sticking with Cubase in hopes that this issue is improved (hopefully in C9), but it’s a very real thing for me. Same computer, too. Last week I tried what someone suggested on another thread and I recreated a Reaper session to mimic a very large Cubase session exactly, since those programs both use the same VST’s folder. For me the difference was night and day, where Cubase was overloading and stuttering on playback with dropouts and Reaper was hovering at around 65% with no dropouts.

As I said I (would like to) stick with Cubase, so I hope whatever is causing this for myself and the other users here (seems to be both on Mac and PC??) gets fixed. I have a 6-core 2014 Mac Pro.