# Realtime DAW performance still peaking after upgrading CPU on Mac Pro



## JT3_Jon (Feb 14, 2016)

I’ve been experiencing real time peaks on a recent project, so I thought an upgrade to the processors in my mac pro 8-core 2.93ghz to a 12-core 3.33ghz would solve it - but my real time performance still peaks just as much as before. Very disappointed. Of course it was only after I did this upgrade that I found this wonderful video by our own Richard Ames (Thank you for making this!!!) 

Though his video is somewhat PC specific, I’ve learnt that raw CPU power does not mean you will not have real time peaks, but this begs the question - anyone have any advice / trouble shooting procedures I can try to reduce my real-time peak? 

My project is running at a buffer of 1024. Would love to run it lower but it obviously peaks so much its unusable, and I cant go higher or I start to get sync issues with my PC slave and PLAY in VE Pro. My sample rate 44.1. I'm running Cubase 8.0.3 on OS 10.9.5 with 32GB ram (16GB free on the mac). I’m also running my system off an SSD, but the rest of my system is standard HD’s, though I have yet to get any sort of disk error in Cubase so I dont know if thats the bottleneck. I’m running most of my instruments / synths off my PC sample slave, but I have do have some kontakt instruments running in VE pro on my mac, as well as some instruments and Vienna VI’s running directly in Cubase. I’ll run more tests on loading instruments in VE pro vs directly in Cubase, but I’d love more feedback on things to try. 

Thanks!


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## José Herring (Feb 14, 2016)

What is your audio card?


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 14, 2016)

Sorry about that. Running a Universal Audio Apollo FW800, though I've tested with built in audio and real time, though not peaking, is still very high.


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## resonate (Feb 15, 2016)

try a clean install of el capitan, it made a lot of difference for my realtime performance on my lowly 2 x 2,26 mac pro 2009


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## kgdrum (Feb 15, 2016)

A bad plug or vi could also be the problem,check to see if any need to be updated for El Capitan


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 15, 2016)

I was thinking of doing a clean install of 10.10. You guys feel its not only safe, but benefitial to just go straight to 10.11? As for "bad plugin" I've noticed that Amplitube 3 takes a lot of real time performance, and seem to even take it when its bypassed! So thats something else to look into. I'm also going to try moving instruments from internal Cubase to VE pro on the same machine and see if there is any real time performance gains.


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## soundgeek (Feb 16, 2016)

I remember trying the demo of amplitube, and having a lot of spikes as well... Didn't buy the software.


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## mc_deli (Feb 16, 2016)

That's funny, I have been layering loads of guitars and using Amplitube 3 (Fender and SVT usually) on maybe 15 tracks and not noticed anything...


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## soundgeek (Feb 17, 2016)

Well, I have an old 2008 MacPro 8 core 2.8ghz, so i'm probably missing some single core processing power for this particular plug ... Overall it's still a decent machine for Logic Pro X and all the plug-ins i use.

I had tested it on a virtual guitar in Kontakt, so that probably added to the processing needs...


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## NYC Composer (Feb 18, 2016)

I still have the 2008 though I did add a Mini slave a while back. Gotta say though, even though it's showing it's age, it's the best computer I've ever owned- now going on 8 years old! I have 18 gig of RAM along with 16 on the Mini. The way I divide things up I don't run out but I could still upgrade it to 64 gig. 4 SSDs, PCI-e slots that could run more SSDs if needed or e-SATA or USB 3, FireWire 400 and 800, 4 USB 2 ports. I don't think we'll see this much
expandability in a Mac again.


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 20, 2016)

NYC - are you running your SSD's in the normal mac pro drive bays?


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 20, 2016)

BTW, I have discovered that for my machine and the work I do, I need to load as much as I can into VE pro. I think this is mainly because of the extra buffer setting in VE pro, but it gives me much more headroom than loading VST instruments directly in Cubase.

For fun I created a project to see how many instances of Omnisphere I could run at 256 + Ve pro hosting all VST's. I was able to load 192 omnisphere instruments (24 full omnispheres) with EACH PART coming back as individual audio streams from VE pro. Not to shabby. I guess I now have to try on my current peaking project to migrate all my internal VST instruments to VE pro instead.


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## NYC Composer (Feb 20, 2016)

I am running them in the normal bays, yes.


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 20, 2016)

Any the performance was a noticeable upgrade from standard spinning HD's? Just curious as the internal bays spec out at 3GHz and cannot utilize the full bandwith SSD's have to offer. Whether or not thats important I dont know.


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## NYC Composer (Feb 21, 2016)

There was a noticeable improvement, yes. Someday I'm going to transition one to a pci card to see the difference.


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## Tanuj Tiku (Feb 21, 2016)

JT3_Jon said:


> I’ve been experiencing real time peaks on a recent project, so I thought an upgrade to the processors in my mac pro 8-core 2.93ghz to a 12-core 3.33ghz would solve it - but my real time performance still peaks just as much as before. Very disappointed. Of course it was only after I did this upgrade that I found this wonderful video by our own Richard Ames (Thank you for making this!!!)
> 
> Though his video is somewhat PC specific, I’ve learnt that raw CPU power does not mean you will not have real time peaks, but this begs the question - anyone have any advice / trouble shooting procedures I can try to reduce my real-time peak?
> 
> ...




I am sorry to hear you are having problems. But, I think by now it is a well documented fact between audio professionals who write music with samples that more cores does not equal better performance!

What you need is higher clock speeds. My 3.5 years old 3930K 6-core overclocked to 4.2 Ghz will outperform or at least equal the new 12-core Mac Pro's. 

If your CPU is running at higher clock speeds, you will get better performance. More cores have not yet had much effect on performance as such. 

This could be for various reasons but as it is obvious, our work requires real-time performance which is a different thing than having more cores. 

Of course, what sound card and DAW you use, including badly coded plug ins will determine some of this. 

This is why for my next machine, I am getting the 8-core i7 overclocked. I could get a 10 X 2 = 20 core Xeon but it is likely to have inferior performance or worse!

If you are really crossing the limits, it is still a good idea to use multiple computers to do the job. At the end of the day, there is a hell of a lot of real-time stuff a CPU is asked to do when using samples, plugins and virtual synths. 

Do tell us your RAM loads, Kontakt instances, sound card and how you have split up your samples on multiple drives on the Mac. Keep the slave out of the picture for now. Solve the problem with the main Mac machine first then move forwards.


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## Tanuj Tiku (Feb 21, 2016)

Okay, I have just read you are using the Apollo sound card. Sorry I missed it in your earlier posts. 

Do share with us exactly how much RAM you are using, how many instances of what kind of samples and synths. 

How many drives do you have and what speeds are they running at? How have you distributed your samples over these drives? 

If they are external, what is the confirmed throughput? What kind and how many drives in the enclosure? And what samples are you loading from these drives? 

What plug ins are you using and how many to run your template?


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## owenave (Feb 29, 2016)

NYC Composer said:


> There was a noticeable improvement, yes. Someday I'm going to transition one to a pci card to see the difference.


What model and year is the Mac Pro? Other World Computers has a lot of info about the different year of Mac Pro and if you can get normal speed bump for your SSD...Like on a Mac Pro 1.1 all of the pci slots are really slower.


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## owenave (Feb 29, 2016)

owenave said:


> What model and year is the Mac Pro? Other World Computers has a lot of info about the different year of Mac Pro and if you can get normal speed bump for your SSD...Like on a Mac Pro 1.1 all of the pci slots are really slower.


I am doing a lot of research right now because trying to figure what year and models would not be fast enough. So far a 12 Core 5.1 w either 32 or 64 gb of ram. SSD for Boot. 2 x 2. tb SSD for Kontact Library's. I have found some great deals out there. Now to wait till Wed when Tax refund gets deposited..... Grins.


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## Vision (Feb 29, 2016)

Tanuj Tiku said:


> I am sorry to hear you are having problems. But, I think by now it is a well documented fact between audio professionals who write music with samples that more cores does not equal better performance!
> 
> What you need is higher clock speeds. My 3.5 years old 3930K 6-core overclocked to 4.2 Ghz will outperform or at least equal the new 12-core Mac Pro's.
> 
> ...




Tanuj I'm using a MacPro. No doubt clock speed is important, but the extra cores have helped me tremendously.. for me it goes hand in hand. To the OP, I wonder if the issue is that cubase doesn't run as efficiently as Logic on a MacPro. Anyway, don't know if this will help, but I posted some comparison video's in another thread of my 2008 8 core vs 2012 12 core. I'm running my OS (10.9.5), and most of my samples on pci-e ssd drives.

http://vi-control.net/community/thr...-upgrade-to-12-core.50634/page-3#post-3940426


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## IFM (Mar 1, 2016)

The other night I was running into some serious real time peaking too on my 12 core. Oddly restarting fixed it till I started playing Vienna VI's. As soon as I disabled all the VIenna Instrument tracks the realtime meter dropped substantially. I think it's a real resource hog and we don't know it. 

Hate to say it but I'm eliminating VI's from my template.


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## JT3_Jon (Apr 13, 2016)

Sorry for the late update. I was able to run some tests a few weeks ago and here is my preliminary conclusions. If I load (a fair amount) of VST instruments inside cubase directly, my AISO performance peaks before I can use all my CPU. This happens regardless if I use AISO Guard or not. However if I load VST instruments outside of cubase in VE pro (on the same computer) I can indeed use 100% of my CPU. Very strange. Perhaps its the added buffer ability of VE pro that allows me to use all my CPU? Either way I'm glad that its at least theoretically possible to use all my CPU for music, but again this is only true if I use VE pro as a host for as much as I can.

So I will no longer be loading VST's directly in cubase in the future, which is a real shame as I find it much easier to load new instruments directly in cubase and keep working, rather then having to worry about adding VE pro ports, midi tracks, etc. But it seems that its a necessity for me, at least in larger projects with lots of plugins / instruments.


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## IFM (Apr 13, 2016)

I should update that I discovered I had turned off ASIO Guard on Vienna Instruments by accident thus what was causing my peaking. Since then it has performed rather well!

Chris


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## peksi (Apr 19, 2016)

A CPU killer for me was a 32 bit plugin haunting in the 64 bit windows 7 system. Best you get rid of all those, assuming that there are such in mac.


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## jononotbono (Jan 18, 2017)

I haven't been able to have VIs in Cubase for a long time. In VEPro it's much better but I still get spiking. It's ridiculous really. 12 core 5,1 3.33ghz Mac Pro with 64gb of ram. Earlier I was playing about, I have two Rack Instruments with one Midi channel connected to each and each of these two rack instruments are connected to two instruments via VEPro on my slave PC. The real time peak bar is halfway!! With a buffer of 512. No plugins. Nothing but two Midi tracks and the VIs on a Slave! I just don't get it.

Perhaps it's my Nvidia GFX 960 card? I have GUI lag when zooming into audio events. The Waves disappear till I release the mouse button. Zooming in via G and H Key commands is fine though so I use that. 

My soundcard and interface is a Motu HD192 so perhaps it's that? It has been discontinued after all.

God knows. It's highly irritating. I want a Mac Pro 6,1 and an Apollo 8p but I have to know it's going to actually just "work". I thought going to Mac was supposed to be headache free?


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## URL (Jan 18, 2017)

Some software is hard on the cpu and creates heavy spikes... and is really pain to use I have problem with tre synths and effects that give me spikes and all other do not and work fine.
When I use Vep on my main daw I tested to freeze Instrument track -not midi track and all spikes is gone, I always freeze when I done, to have more mix power. Engine 2 that is main for Era, Forest K... is really heavy on the Cpu if it used as multitimbral inside Engine 2. I can use a lot of Vi with my new Pc daw but...there is some software that don't use multi core... Cubase 901 is more heavy on the cpu than 8.5 in my Pc setup and I can't really understand why...

Not much help but- When I used Mac tower Q-core when I load 1 Omnisphere I hade to go to 512 cache to not get spikes...crazy... a lot depends on software- but if you have issue with graphic gard maybe you should start there to change if possible.

I also discovered when connecting things in my new setup that I hade wrong ethernet cable cat5E and hade problems with my slave, when I change cable to Cat6 all the problems with one slave was gone...Hrm, strange.


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## colony nofi (Jan 18, 2017)

For the following, I'm talking about OSX here.

Hosting Kontakt / Sample instruments outside of cubase will enable better multi-core performance. There was a lot of testing done on this a few years ago, and the results were extremely conclusive.
There are myriads of reasons for this - and it goes far beyond "I wish cubase would improve their multi-core performance" - or "if VEPro can do it, why can't Cubase" etc etc.

Things have improved with ASIO Guard 2, but its not a magic potion a lot of people were hoping it to be. 

A few other things worth noting. Large numbers of GROUP or FX channels will noticeably impact on realtime performance of cubase in OSX.

Sound card choice has a much bigger impact than you may expect on realtime performance. 

Background tasks in OSX can severely impact things in cubase - and often it is very tricky to trackdown what is going on.

Enabling / Disabling tracks is your friend - as is freeze. 

As noted above, rogue 32bit plugins can have a big performance impact. 

Cubase does have full multi-core programming, but it will not scale across a system evenly. I've had it explained to me that it is to do with the legacy nature of the program. Its just not possible to create an extremely efficient multi-core implementation without a complete re-write, which is out of the question. (Top tip - next time you see a steinberg rep at a conference, play a game of guess the number of lines of code in cubase. It shocked me when I learnt. I'm not confident enough with my memory right now to give you a figure, but it is enough to make you want to sit down and sigh once you hear it!)

Finally. We did some tests at my studios soon after the current mac pro's came out - and the sweet spot for OUR type of work (some post, some composition) was definitely the 6 core running at 3.33. We had the 4, 6, 8 and 12 in here at different times running the same tests. The 8 would outperform the 6 in some instances, but not enough to justify the cost. For us.

And finally - it is ALWAYS worth having a clean install on a disk image - meaning if weird things start happening, just copy back your disk image which is known to be clean - and go from there.

EDIT : Thanks must go to folk far more intelligent than me for most of this info. There are some truly wonderful tech folk in the music / sound post world, and I'm forever in your debt. They don't frequent this board unfortunately...


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## synthpunk (Jan 18, 2017)

Epic post thanks for sharing. Glad to see your findings on the 6 core. What method do you use for your disk image? Carbon copy cloner or similar?



colony nofi said:


> Finally. We did some tests at my studios soon after the current mac pro's came out - and the sweet spot for OUR type of work (some post, some composition) was definitely the 6 core running at 3.33. We had the 4, 6, 8 and 12 in here at different times running the same tests. The 8 would outperform the 6 in some instances, but not enough to justify the cost. For us.
> 
> And finally - it is ALWAYS worth having a clean install on a disk image - meaning if weird things start happening, just copy back your disk image which is known to be clean - and go from there.


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## colony nofi (Jan 18, 2017)

synthpunk said:


> Epic post thanks for sharing. Glad to see your findings on the 6 core. What method do you use for your disk image? Carbon copy cloner or similar?


I use disk utility. Sure doesn't have all the options of some other software, but its simple and it works.
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22247?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US
This *doesn't* make a bootable clone - just an image you can restore at a later date off another drive.


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## jononotbono (Jan 18, 2017)

colony nofi said:


> For the following, I'm talking about OSX here.
> 
> Hosting Kontakt / Sample instruments outside of cubase will enable better multi-core performance. There was a lot of testing done on this a few years ago, and the results were extremely conclusive.
> There are myriads of reasons for this - and it goes far beyond "I wish cubase would improve their multi-core performance" - or "if VEPro can do it, why can't Cubase" etc etc.
> ...



Great post man! Thanks.

I need to cleanly install Sierra but it's just having enough time and no looming deadlines to do so. Oh, and if I do then I would have to upgrade to Cubase 9 just so everything is cleanly installed. It's the best time to do the upgrade.

Out of interest, does anyone know where the best place is to get a secondhand 6 Core 6,1?


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## URL (Jan 18, 2017)

colony nofi said:


> For the following, I'm talking about OSX here.
> 
> Hosting Kontakt / Sample instruments outside of cubase will enable better multi-core performance. There was a lot of testing done on this a few years ago, and the results were extremely conclusive.
> There are myriads of reasons for this - and it goes far beyond "I wish cubase would improve their multi-core performance" - or "if VEPro can do it, why can't Cubase" etc etc.
> ...




Its not all about cubase performances, Im been using OsX for years and now Win 10 and there is similar problems that I could

traced to software (Synth/effects) that are very cpu heavy, and probably not well developed for 64bit software that does not use multicore correctly and there will be some core that becomes congested, or the PCI bus overloaded bandwidth because that might utilize all the bandwidth for graphics cards and I do not believe Cubase or Logic is the problems fully.

When I load more Instrument in Cubase somehow the cores get more balanced some software don't ever works until day have done a update. Thats my experience with OsX and win 10.


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## synthpunk (Jan 18, 2017)

Apple Certified Refurbished
http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac



jononotbono said:


> Out of interest, does anyone know where the best place is to get a secondhand 6 Core 6,1?


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## URL (Jan 19, 2017)

Neutron update 1.01
CPU Optimizations


Up to 20% performance improvement when Masking Meter is enabled and Neutron’s user interface is closed
Up to 11% performance improvement when using Neutron’s EQ user interface


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## JT3_Jon (Feb 22, 2017)

Great tips Colony! 

Couple questions if you dont mind: 



colony nofi said:


> A few other things worth noting. Large numbers of GROUP or FX channels will noticeably impact on realtime performance of cubase in OSX.



This is good to know, and I have started adding more mix and send plugins directly in VE Pro instead of in Cubase. However, I still like to have many audio inputs from VE Pro into cubase to make stemming easier / quicker. Does this also adversely effect realtime performance? Any advice? Same question in regards to multiple smaller VE pro instances vs 1-2 large ones. 



colony nofi said:


> And finally - it is ALWAYS worth having a clean install on a disk image - meaning if weird things start happening, just copy back your disk image which is known to be clean - and go from there.



How do you deal with new plugins or software updates in this scenario? Is this disk image only for your initial OS install, so if you did need to go back, you have to install all your plugins & software from scratch?


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## colony nofi (Feb 22, 2017)

Re new plugins / software updates...
I can only comment on what works for me. Essentially, I start with a clean drive. Install os, and all software I know I need to run my system. I have a spreadsheet of all my software - and pointers to my password manager / logins for all software licenses etc. I check things off as I go. This goes for things like general audio / os utilities, as well as plugins and kontakt libs (which need installation inside kontakt).
Once it is up and working, I take an image of that drive. Then, if I want to install anything more than a sound lib / kontakt lib etc (which is fine, as they go on my samples drive) - so, say new software or a VST, I re-image the drive... or if its a really basic "throw a VST in the right directory" I make a note of what I've installed in a spreadsheet, and re-install it manually if I need to go back to an image at any stage.
Essentially, if I'm ever concerned something that I've installed has stuffed up my system, I just go back to my latest image, and load it back up (its a quick process) and then install any new stuff that didn't make it into the image. And then save another image. 
I hope im making sense.

Re your q regarding realtime performance and VEPro... I'm not really sure - but I've personally only ever used a couple of instances per slave (I didn't have high power slaves) - but I have not tested this recently, as I am now running everything in one cubase session using disabled tracks. (No more VEPro for me at the moment.)


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