Update… I removed the NVIDIA card in favor of an AMD Radeon RX570. This instantly improved, but didn’t fix the problem. The latency reports all continued to show errors (fewer) but they were related to other USB drivers, etc.
My next step was to completely nuke Win 10 and Reset the OS. I clean installed Cubase 9.5.41 and Kontakt 5.8.1. This was THE BEST performance I’ve had in more than a month. My “testing library” is the 8dio 1928 piano. Before, any sustain pedal playing would clip the RTP meter and spike Cubase outputs. Now it performed well… but here’s the STRANGE observation… this was with Kontakt Multiprocessing Enabled.
Typically, I’ve had trouble when both Cubase and Kontakt have multiprocessing enabled. The old solution is to disable Kontakt MP support. I did this on the clean install, and everything went to sh!t. Terrible performance. Enabled the Kontakt MP support again, and the performance was improved. Still not amazing, as the instrument will clip the RTP when releasing the sustain pedal… but it’s at least workable.
What are your experiences and current settings for using Cubase and Kontakt together? Multiprocessor support enabled in one or both?