Cubase Multicore OSX. Is there an issue?

J-S-Q · February 16, 2018, 11:49pm

In_Stereo:

J-S-Q:

How much of your CPU power can be utilised by Cubase depends hugely on the nature of your project.

If you have many individual tracks with a couple of plugins each, you will be able to run a very high track count, and load up all of your CPU cores to a high degree. However, if you have just one or two tracks with many CPU intensive plugins, routed through some group channels with lots of plugins, you can easily bring your CPU to it’s knees whilst many cores are lying idle.

See attached screenshot showing 24 cores all highly loaded running a Cubase session.CPU Cores.JPG

Interesting, thanks for posting about that. I have gigantic sessions with many tracks and groups and sends, most with plugins on them. In similar sessions with the same plugins (all scoring sessions, so they were setup very similarly) on PT and Reaper, there was far more CPU available and better spread across cores. That was my experience, anyway, on Mac Pros with Xeon processors. I see you’re on Windows – this thread was about OS X, so maybe there’s a difference in favor of Windows? I don’t know since I’m not on Windows.

I was a Mac user for many years -still am, but just not for my studio computer. Purely anecdotally (from seeing stuff online and from talking to friends) it does appear that Cubase currently runs slightly better on Windows. Anyway, I’m not sure if there is much difference between Mac and PC with this particular issue and I think to some extent it is present in all DAW’s. It’s easy to test:

Take the plugin of your choice
Create an audio track with 8 instances of that plugin.
See how many times you can duplicate that track before the audio starts breaking up/crackling

Now repeat the process but instead of duplicating the track, route it to a group track with 8 instances of your chosen plugin. Then route it to another group track with 8 instances etc. You will find that the number of plugins you are able to run is vastly reduced if they are chained through multiple groups compared to if they are all on separate audio tracks.