Are all hosts share more or less the same CPU performance when running plugins?

[DuX]

I can absolutely believe these percentages, since neither Cubase nor Reaper are OS-X native. They will get better with time, though.

It will be interesting to see how DP will perform on Windows... I kinda like that proggie, but I don't think it will perform better than even Cubase.

Someone mentioned ProTools? As far as I know, everyone I know who use it, have it just to show off, as a spare DAW. For nothing else. And absolutely nobody works with MIDI and VSTi in it, from the people I know. 'nuff said.

Cheers!

[hibidy]

Reap is best, by far, not even close. Did I mention how much better it is?

That you've tried. The "big boys", aka Cubase, Logic and ProTools are not getting mentioned as contestants whenever people declare Reaper to be the king, and I can only assume that was because they weren't ever tried in any depth

Ableton was always a weird niche kind of DAW that never favored MIDI or instruments, Fruity Loops was always just this weird thing marketed towards "beginners" just like Reason, and the newer stuff is likely not matured yet, just like the early days of Reaper found it a bit lacking in many ways...

But FFS, let's not declare Reaper superior to the "big boys" without actually trying them... and I personally despise Cubase, Logic and ProTools(nor have I personally tried their most recent versions), but fair is fair...

I had cubase when I bought this. Reaper IS better. But I sold cubey, so was just listing hosts I currently own.

I don't care if anyone likes/dislikes a host, I'm just talking about how they run on this exact same machine with the exact same soundcard

[sqigls]

...I ditched Cubase for Reaper...

ZOMG, who would ever object to having to sit idle waiting for a new dongle to arrive because your old one broke, or the usual shiteness of a fresh X.0.0 release of Cubase, that will take Steinberg 6-12 months to fix, at which point the next version will be coming out with new features they could've put in the last version

WOW, that's pretty extreme.
Please, raise your hand if this exact situation has happened to you.
Um, yeeeah.

Steinberg suck, but really!? You make it sound like this kind of thing is happening to everybody.

[hibidy]

@DP on windows: I don't think I've heard one single person talk about it What, is it still not released or something?

I liked it on mac, tore wogic pwoh 7 a new one in performance. It was however a woefully underpowered imac, I mean Icrap.

[jeffh]

...I ditched Cubase for Reaper...

ZOMG, who would ever object to having to sit idle waiting for a new dongle to arrive because your old one broke, or the usual shiteness of a fresh X.0.0 release of Cubase, that will take Steinberg 6-12 months to fix, at which point the next version will be coming out with new features they could've put in the last version

WOW, that's pretty extreme.
Please, raise your hand if this exact situation has happened to you.
Um, yeeeah.

Steinberg suck, but really!? You make it sound like this kind of thing is happening to everybody.

If all of the above hasn't happened to you, then you clearly haven't been a Steinberg customer for very long...

Yours Truly,
(paying) Cubase SX 1-3 Customer (ie: that's $2000 I'll never get back...)

[bmanic]

Changing buffer settings helps any DAW load more plug ins.
256 or lower for composing and 1024 or higher for mix down.

Yes of course but I was not talking about the ASIO / driver buffer. Reaper has quite a few buffer settings you can tweak in the preferences. One of them is directly related to the anticipative FX engine. It's default at 200ms but if you put it to something like 600ms then I can suddenly run a whole bunch more plugins before it starts stuttering. Of course you'll loose some responsiveness of the DAW but being able to squeeze a few dozen more plugins is worth it when you get in trouble.

Cheers!
bManic

[ObsoleteAcc99]

I've used quite a lot of different DAWs and in my experience Reaper is by far the most efficient (not sure how it is on OS-X though). If you run into some stutters while mixing then simply dialing in a larger buffer for the anticipative engine will get you quite a lot more still.

I've mixed a few projects at 96kHz recently and had a crazy amount of plugins running.. this on a quite old i7 920.

I can only imagine how it runs on the current top of the line CPUs.

Cheers!
bManic

on mac, no, to answer you.. it's better than live/cubase/s1 but still a good 30% behind logic..

[ObsoleteAcc99]

lolz

I like this subject, but this will end badly.

I can take the same exact computer with the same exact plugs and get strange differences between them.

Reap is best, by far, not even close. Did I mention how much better it is?

Sonar is second, but uses the first core and then starts fanning stuff out on the other 7....eventually. Kinda strange

Live actually supports a ton of plugs, but it's weird too. I can load one instance of a plug and it will say 56% cpu. Then I can add oh.......GOBS more and it will sometimes lower the CPU use RARELY does it spike. I've got a couple of projects with so many cpu intensive amp sims (like 8 tracks) and all kinds of comps/eq's all over the place and it says......you guessed it......about 50%

Studio one was a nightmare, and it's still kinda scary, but I'm not getting the cpu spikes like I was prior to 2.5 (kontakt was particularly bad) It's now similar to live......you look like you are running out quickly and you can keep adding tracks and it's fine. Very strange.

Yep, I still have FL and it's still the worst by far

Anyways, this is all on the same computer with the same specs so, it is what it is.

you're funny. you're not seeing the cpu usage increase because of your extra cores.. live has one meter for ALL cores.. so you can put a plug in on it worth 20% of cpu, and nothing will rise until you have maxed out that 20% on all your other cores, or if one of the other cores loads something more than 20%, then the figure will go to that, and won't increase until other cores get loaded, and so on.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

That being said, it seems to be a "well known fact" that logic is very CPU efficient by design. I dont know how or why, but do a search for "logic efficiency" in google and you will find tons of people who have run similar tests finding Logic to be a very CPU efficient DAW.

'

because it uses a cheat buffer of 1024, 2048, 0r 4096 samples (you choose) on tracks that are not record armed.

but even at 1024 it performs much better than cubase at 1024.. have checked all this.

[hibidy]

you're funny. you're not seeing the cpu usage increase because of your extra cores.. live has one meter for ALL cores.. so you can put a plug in on it worth 20% of cpu, and nothing will rise until you have maxed out that 20% on all your other cores, or if one of the other cores loads something more than 20%, then the figure will go to that, and won't increase until other cores get loaded, and so on.

Yeah, well, kinda figured. But it's still strange. The reap is optimized so it only shows what is actually being used and doesn't bog down on one core (at least not on windoze.

[machinesworking]

I can absolutely believe these percentages, since neither Cubase nor Reaper are OS-X native. They will get better with time, though.

Cubase I doubt. I don't doubt that Reaper will improve, though when is up in the air.

It will be interesting to see how DP will perform on Windows... I kinda like that proggie, but I don't think it will perform better than even Cubase.

Who knows for sure? It has a pre-rendering trick it does to save resources. You really notice this with doing stress tests, it hits 70-80% and stays there for at least double the plug ins.

They've yet to release it for Windows, but it's rumored to be released with the next update.
That should be within the next couple months.

[hibidy]

That's pretty sad. That was the big announcement at namm 2012! They had a working alpha (or beta?) then and it's still not released. Anyways, it's not really on my radar anymore (like a cat-crazy host) but still, that is pretty lame.

[sqigls]

If all of the above hasn't happened to you, then you clearly haven't been a Steinberg customer for very long...

Yours Truly,
(paying) Cubase SX 1-3 Customer (ie: that's $2000 I'll never get back...)

actually (just for the record), I've been a Cubase user since the Atari.

I keep telling myself I won't upgrade, but every few versions they bring out features which make it much easier to stay in the right brain for longer.

I do understand where you're at, but it's a bit of an extreme case.

I have no problems with it anymore, it's more stable and functional than the other trackers i've used, and the possible slight CPU difference that might be between Cubase and Reaper isn't that much of a concern now I have a killer machine. Plugin algorithms are getting so in depth now, which kinda brings the whole shebang back to zero point again, except now everything is oversampled (etc) and finally sounds the equivalent of a studio full of hardware.

[machinesworking]

That's pretty sad. That was the big announcement at namm 2012! They had a working alpha (or beta?) then and it's still not released. Anyways, it's not really on my radar anymore (like a cat-crazy host) but still, that is pretty lame.

Would you rather they release it buggy as hell?
DP8 on OSX is remarkably stable, ridiculously so. Obviously they found issues with the Windows version. MOTU at least do this right, no software is 100% bug free, but if there's even a Cubase level of bugs in the first DP released for Windows and people will accuse it of being a "primarily mac product" etc. Cubase lost a lot of OSX customers when it was found that similarly specced computers were drastically different in performance depending on platform.

I'm not a patient person either, but after Logic 7.0 and all the crap it put me through I would rather not wait for a bug fix update to work on songs I started in a crashing disaster again.

Seriously, be glad they aren't releasing it a buggy mess, let that be Logic, Live, NI, and Cubase's checkered past.

[jancivil]

...I ditched Cubase for Reaper...

ZOMG, who would ever object to having to sit idle waiting for a new dongle to arrive because your old one broke, or the usual shiteness of a fresh X.0.0 release of Cubase, that will take Steinberg 6-12 months to fix, at which point the next version will be coming out with new features they could've put in the last version

WOW, that's pretty extreme.
Please, raise your hand if this exact situation has happened to you.
Um, yeeeah.

Steinberg suck, but really!? You make it sound like this kind of thing is happening to everybody.

My experience with a broken dongle was someone at steiny support sorted me the same afternoon right before a holiday, after hours where he was. I didn't even have it registered, as that dongle went back to pre-Yamaha times and I avoided dealing with 'My Steinberg'. I needed that to get VSL to replace licenses ASAP, which was no factor since a 'vienna key' which can be got at Guitar Center has 180 starts for anything you have. I was able to keep using Cubase. FTR Steinberg did not need to ship me a key.

There is kind of an art to getting people to help you and I think some people expect to be belligerent like that's going to work. There is also a thing where people confound their forum with 'support'.


I like to keep working and I know better than adopting .0 and .01 versions of Cubase if it's mission critical.