This is also good practice because I don't rely on magical stuff on the master to sound good. At that stage I'm more into mixing than recording so I can set the buffer higher. My trick is to avoid heavy processing on the master until late in the project. My guess is that this is a common source of performance issues.

Total CPU utilization goes down, because most cores spend time idle, waiting for that core to finishĪ single track, bus or group needs a single core, so avoid putting a lot of processing in the same serial chain if you get performance problems.

One core (third from the top) is much more loaded.

Predictively, Cubase behaves exactly the same with group processing as with master processing. I have done the same test but on a group bus before the master. This give results that can be listened to but with a lot of noticable dropuots.

This is to mimic a typical case when we load a single group or bus with plugins that put a lot of demand on the CPU.

I've now added several TDR Limiter 6 to the master bus (heavy stuff, both CPU and sound wise). What happens when we pass audio through a single bus/group? With ASIO Guard High Cubase can scale very well to multiple cores when faced with a load that allows it. When playing back, my computer acts like in the attached pictures. But as we will see, it can teach us some important lessons. It's obviously a contrived setup, no real project is so easily balanced by Cubase. And no, I don't own Acustica stuff, it's incompatible with my workflow. I chose those plugins because they're some of the most demanding I own.

48 Massive X tracks, all burdened with S-Gear and and TDR Kotelnikov GE plugins.

But as it's totally focused on audio, I think the results are generalizable and applicable for many.Īnd here's the setup in Cubase for most tests

This maybe a bit more powerful than many of the computers in use here.

Windows 10 professional, no tweaks other than Ultimate Performance.

No other disturbing software (no games and ****.).

Computer from Scan audio, setup for DAW use.

AMD Ryzen 3900X 12 core CPU, no overclocking.

Now comes the meat and potatoes of this thread: how Cubase works.

Nuendo or cubase