There is something wrong with 9.0.20.
Projects created prior to 9.0.20 were playing back with an unusual amount of CPU spikes. I raised the latency to a higher number and that settled it down…but not completely.
I always let a freshly launched Project play through before working on it, so Cubase can roll over the spots where the introduction of some instrument track parts would spike and register, clearing up on the next playback and for the rest of the session. With 9.0.20, this wasn’t happening. And many of these Projects were using less than 8 Instruments and audio combined.
I rolled back to 9.0.10, dropped latency back to it’s smaller setting (192ms), and ran the same tunes. No spikes or dropouts. To me, that’s quantifiable evidence that something is amiss.
This is the first revision of Cubase I’ve had to roll back to in ages and I find it rather disappointing.