Things I hate about... - Cubase 7

[SJ_Digriz]

You are arguing for the sake of it and because it's me. I said Cubase 7 doesn't have incompatibility within itself of certain chipsets. If the hardware and interface combination are not working in harmony, that is not cubase 7's incompatibility, it's a hardware issue.

What i said is 100% correct, and i'm not going to play silly semantics with you.

No more from me on this, except to help Kate directly if i can.

No actually I'm not trying to argue with you because it's you. This is just one of those cases where people misunderstand how NOT universal internal MB configurations are. Cubase CAN indeed have incompatibility in an of itself with a chipset because of the fact that it rides the ASIO driver layer.

But, seriously I'm not trying argue with you on this. I'm not even saying that Cubase might be at fault. But I am saying that Reaper, Sonar, S1 and Cubase could all write an ASIO wrapper that behaved differently on the same chipset(s).

So, I'll let it go at that ... again it wasn't targeted at you as much as I see that argument all the time and it is incorrect.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Compyfox]

Actually, my rig is OC'd (undervolted!) and I have EIST (called Speed Step in my BIOS) and C1E (advanced halt state) active, also HT, but C-State is off. Actually even tried to turn of EIST while testing - and it didn't offer me any difference. I didn't find any turbo settings after the BIOS update, and my rig shows correct 3,6GHz on boot. Both CPU-z and CoreTemp show correct values in Windows on idle and stress test (idle it's about 2,3GHz until the CPU spikes above 1% - which doesn't matter anymore as soon as Cubase is running, else it's 3,6GHz). My OS is setup to "Performance" (everything at 100%) - according to certain OCing posts I've read, that's the same as turning off "turbo".

Come to think of it - with EIST off and Cubase's internal "performance switch" - my rig slowed down drastically and heated up to a state where it wasn't funny anymore. So I left it on - no crashes, no blue screens, no spikes.

?


And... I have had just as worse performance before I OC'd compared to C6.5. A fellow with a slightly OC'd Sandy Bridge and all that junk turned off had similar readouts than I had (with a test project).

So in my case, the host is the culprit - I can pretty much rule out my hardware. Especially of Reaper and Co offer way higher performance/way lower load. Thankfully I don't have random spikes (only on project launch and on certain plugin load, and mostly only in 32bit) - I have general bad performance overall.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[CableChannel]

@Compyfox: have you also tried disabling C1E?

And I read that core parking should be disabled for Intel CPUs (or is that equal to EIST?)

[Compyfox]

I tried it with both on and off - trust me, no difference.
But I can try again tomorrow, just to be 100% sure. Though I don't expect any significant difference (again, tested it before)

Don't ask me about core parking. I am happy that I can understand half of this BIOS stuff these days.


Cooling is acourate - Noctua U12, two fans (actually 4, if I count the case fans - one blowing down from top, one out of the back), ultra low noise:
40degree C in idle, 72 degree C absolute max on Prime with a 12h run. With Low Noise Adpater, I get to 69 degrees, with no noise adapters, I get to 65 degrees on full load with Prime. Totally normal values for my CPU (it's eating 130W after all).

[CableChannel]

About core parking: I read somewhere that it can be critical as to ASIO spikes. I tried this tool:

http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

until I discovered that I have an AMD that does not have core parking

Anyway, you might give that utility a shot?

[Compyfox]

I just tried that one, and my HT cores were all greyed out, the regular ones were barely registering. So I don't think this is an issue - power management was on 100% already. And the Win7 Update I ran (from Winfuture) covered that fix.

But it's worth a shot. If everything else fails - I can still roll back.


EDIT:
What bugs me the most however... "we users" test "for Steinberg" what is working and what is not. Even to a level where we do BIOS edits, registry hacks, mess with deep-level OS routines. That is IMO not cool just to get one host to run like it should have right from the start.

Seriously... not cool.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[CableChannel]

Seriously... not cool.

+1

I get angrier every second I think about this, that's why I stop thinking about it. Because we are just f**ed, we cannot do anything about it. The only means we have is don't use Cubase, but that is kind of a self punishment.

So lets keep on and hope things improve.

[Compyfox]

So lets keep on and hope things improve.

Still pisses me off. These tests take time, editing is not always possible in a simple form, and we also need third party tools to further optimize what should be already optimized.

Compyfox, have you put your machine through a studio one test, head for head with the same plugins, at the same latency, with asio guard off of course to make it fair, to see how much worse C7 is performing for you? I mean like a simple test, say 8 audio files looping on 8 tracks, insert a vst effect as many instances as you can till pops and crackles, same test with same effect in C7.. and the exact numbers and effect used (try two) and let us know, so we can see just how different C is performing for you on your system to other hosts.

Haven't done that with C7 vs S1 v2, but actually C7 vs Reaper.

4 channels: two guitars, bass, drums
On the guitars and bass were TwoNotes Torpedo with two cabinets each, on drums was VBC. It ate about 60% load in Cubase. Even after the most recent WoS III version and running at 64bit (which performed about 5-10% better).

Almost the same FX setting (sans VBC) in Reaper, though with 8(!) cabins per guitar and in 32bit: 15% load(!!!).

Same ASIO driver, same buffer size, same sampling rate - and actually stronger load per plugin. Reaper performed over 70% better than Cubase! Ouch.



Another test I did was with 3 different VoS plugins in C6.5. I think I had like 24-32 channels with 3 inserts per channel and about 50-70% ASIO load in C6.0x, and C7 barfed with about 20% more load and ASIO LED going off constantly. That was months ago, where I first made that issue apparent to Steinberg.

Even sent them my project and the involved plugins. They didn't even further comment on it.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[mkdr]

Haven't done that with C7 vs S1 v2, but actually C7 vs Reaper.

4 channels: two guitars, bass, drums
On the guitars and bass were TwoNotes Torpedo with two cabinets each, on drums was VBC. It ate about 60% load in Cubase. Even after the most recent WoS III version and running at 64bit (which performed about 5-10% better).

Almost the same FX setting (sans VBC) in Reaper, though with 8(!) cabins per guitar and in 32bit: 15% load(!!!).

Same ASIO driver, same buffer size, same sampling rate - and actually stronger load per plugin. Reaper performed over 70% better than Cubase! Ouch.



Another test I did was with 3 different VoS plugins in C6.5. I think I had like 24-32 channels with 3 inserts per channel and about 50-70% ASIO load in C6.0x, and C7 barfed with about 20% more load and ASIO LED going off constantly. That was months ago, where I first made that issue apparent to Steinberg.

Even sent them my project and the involved plugins. They didn't even further comment on it.

This is because Reaper uses a system very similar to Asio Guard. They call it anticipative fx processing. If you use C7 without Asio Guard you are effectively using just one core. I think the big bug you are seeing is the new way C7 is structured internally. It is actually much much more efficient. You just need to take advantage of this new feature. C7 uses one thread for live processes, you can see it's cpu usage from the lower bar on the cpu meter. The upper bar marks the total cpu usage. Mostly you should see the lower bar hovering near zero, until you grab a channel with a heavy plugin instrument which then gets loaded to the live thread.

It is a shame these features aren't properly documented. Learn to use them though and C7 actually performs a lot better than C6.. and on par with Reaper. Actually could be even better. Haven't benchmarked the difference.

So, activate Asio Guard on your plugins and on your audio settings. Try your test again.


Edit: Ah remembered this a bit wrong; Cubase doesn't show you the total cpu usage. It's always kindof just per one core. So if you have 8 cores and you load an instrument that eats up 90% of your processing bar you can still load 7 more.. and the bar keeps at it's place. Just like on C6. Asio Guard OFF you get to do this too. But with Asio Guard ON this is much much more efficient. Sometimes the difference being literally like comparing 1core against many.

[mkdr]

The tests I did (and my fellows as well) with an (in)official Steinberg project showed, that the higher the CPU generation, the better the performance in Cubase 6. Cubase 7 however only showed an improvement of 5% absoluite maximum - spanned over several CPU generations (Bloomfield to Haswell).

So what you encounter, is the infamous ASIO Engine issue. Just from your descriptions alone.

If you run this test with Asio Guard off you are seeing the performance of just one core. CPU generations have mostly upgraded their core amount, while single cores have stayed pretty much the same on their processing power. In C7 you need to use Asio Guard to get the performance of all your cores.

[mkdr]

72 degree C absolute max on Prime with a 12h run. With Low Noise Adpater, I get to 69 degrees, with no noise adapters, I get to 65 degrees on full load with Prime. Totally normal values for my CPU (it's eating 130W after all).

You are killing it. Intel specs the absolute maximum you should have for i7 920 as 67.9°C.

I'm running a hexacore and its 47°C after 6 hours of max load on all cores (max load on the pcie GPU too.. so even extra heat compared to DAW work). You should also take note of your Mobo temperature as that is where all your data is moving. They have cooling needs too. Mine is at 37°C after 6 hours of full load.

So you definitely don't have an adequate cooling.. or you are OC-cooking it too much..