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Big issues Cubase 13 + Mac Studio M2 Ultra. Help!

GrapeBotherhood

GrapeBotherhood

New Member
Hi, I have a brand new Mac Studio M2 Ultra, with 128 Gb of Ram.

In Cubase 13 I can barely run 60 tracks in Kontakt 7! Glitches and cracks and pops appear almost immediately when I star playback....Kontak "CPU" signal flashes red, disk is ok. Libraries are in the main and only internal M2 Ultra drive.

I'm running Cubase 13 Native;
High Buffer Settings (at max)
48 kHz or 92 kHz makes no difference so far...

Kontakt internal multiprocessor option on or off = no difference either.
Played with different ASIO settings as well, nothing changes.
I tried a UA piano plugin duplicated in many tracks, to make sure it wasn't only a Kontakt issue but...same problem.

I'm using normal orchestral libraries. I tried as well increasing or decreasing preload buffer into Kontakt, nothing works!

Is it possible that Cubase can't make use of all cores, and gets stuck on efficiency ones?
Is there a way to "force" the system to spread its powers across many cores when in Cubase?

I monitored the CPU cores during the audio playback, as you can see in the screenshot below it seems some cores are asleep.

Thank you all for your help!




Screenshot 2024-02-08 alle 16.05.16.png
Click to read more...
 
Try it without your audio interface as a troubleshooting step. You might also try the somewhat counterintuitive step of reducing your buffer size (say to 128).
 
Same here... Maxed out M2 Mac Studio and I have the same dropouts and peak issues that I had with my previous Hackintosh(Intel Based)... it doesn't happen with samples streaming, though (brutally fast), but with Soft synths and some heavily scripted Kontakt libraries (synth stuff) I have the same dropouts... Issues I already had before with Cubase and thought they were CPU efficiency Based.

I'm using a Fireface 802.

With the considerable upgrade into the M2 as far as CPU related, I have to say I'm not too impressed with Cubase in this matter.
 
GrapeBotherhood said:
Is it possible that Cubase can't make use of all cores, and gets stuck on efficiency ones?
Is there a way to "force" the system to spread its powers across many cores when in Cubase?



Screenshot 2024-02-08 alle 16.05.16.png
Click to expand...
That's definitely the issue and it isn't Cubase, it's the Mac. You'll need to find out how to run all cores, wish I could help there. I had issues until I opened up all 24 cores/32 threads on my i9-13900, NO core parking now. There must be some utility or setting to do that on th M2, hopefully someone knows.
 
PaulieDC said:
That's definitely the issue and it isn't Cubase, it's the Mac. You'll need to find out how to run all cores, wish I could help there. I had issues until I opened up all 24 cores/32 threads on my i9-13900, NO core parking now. There must be some utility or setting to do that on th M2, hopefully someone knows.
Click to expand...
I discovered thanks to a video on youtube that spreading sample instruments in as many different Kontakt istances as possible, kind of forces the cpu to use more cores for the work.
I tested it and was able to increase considerably the number of tracks played without drops/clicks.

Still, I think there's large room for improvement - I must be missing something else.

On a side note (or perhaps related to my issue?) since I bought the machine one month ago, it crashed on me and restarted 2 times, which is VERY weird for a mac, in my experience. Both times the error messages I received said something like:

"CORE 0 is the one that panicked. "

I will have perhaps to post this on another thread, since this error didn't happen while I was using cubase or kontakt....
If anyone has any knowledge on that, or on how to further improve the track count in cubase without drops, I'm eager to learn!
 
GrapeBotherhood said:
Hi, I have a brand new Mac Studio M2 Ultra, with 128 Gb of Ram.

In Cubase 13 I can barely run 60 tracks in Kontakt 7! Glitches and cracks and pops appear almost immediately when I star playback....Kontak "CPU" signal flashes red, disk is ok. Libraries are in the main and only internal M2 Ultra drive.

I'm running Cubase 13 Native;
High Buffer Settings (at max)
48 kHz or 92 kHz makes no difference so far...

Kontakt internal multiprocessor option on or off = no difference either.
Played with different ASIO settings as well, nothing changes.
I tried a UA piano plugin duplicated in many tracks, to make sure it wasn't only a Kontakt issue but...same problem.

I'm using normal orchestral libraries. I tried as well increasing or decreasing preload buffer into Kontakt, nothing works!

Is it possible that Cubase can't make use of all cores, and gets stuck on efficiency ones?
Is there a way to "force" the system to spread its powers across many cores when in Cubase?

I monitored the CPU cores during the audio playback, as you can see in the screenshot below it seems some cores are asleep.

Thank you all for your help!




Screenshot 2024-02-08 alle 16.05.16.png
Click to expand...
Newbie sounding question, but what cpu monitor is that?
 
UPDATE:

I distributed instruments into as many kontakt istances into VIENNA PRO 7.

Now I can easily play back between 800-1000 tracks at 192 buffer. That is great, especially because some tracks involved dense chords and chord changes to trigger as many voices as possible for testing purpose.

NOW, I need to figure out a way to get the same results with Kontakt. Loading loads of istances into Cubase without Vienna looks messy, so perhaps it's a question of balance and how many tracks to fit in less istances as possible, spread evenly?

Again, any tips and tricks in regards of forcing the cpu to use as many cores as possible (but without vienna) are wellcome!
 
PaulieDC said:
That's definitely the issue and it isn't Cubase, it's the Mac. You'll need to find out how to run all cores, wish I could help there. I had issues until I opened up all 24 cores/32 threads on my i9-13900, NO core parking now. There must be some utility or setting to do that on th M2, hopefully someone knows.
Click to expand...
It almost certainly is Cubase (or Cubase+Kontakt), and not the Mac. They've had all kinds of problems with "hybrid architecture" [sic] CPUs. The latest releases of Cubase 13 and Kontakt 7 apparently contained improvements here: @GrapeBotherhood, are you absolutely up-to-date with both? Kontakt may do better at CPU handling without Cubase in the way, so have you tried running Kontakt in stand-alone mode rather than as a plugin?

The Steinberg forums have a few useful threads like this one: as usual, you have to filter out all the voodoo, but there are some sensible ideas to test, such as disabling/reducing AsioGuard and/or removing oversampling plugins. And, trying without the interface if you haven't already.

In general, seeing some cores maxed out and others idle is good and normal, and does not indicate a problem. Tweaking the operating system scheduler (via CPU utilities or settings, e.g.) will almost always hurt performance, so you need to be sure you're doing it for a good reason - like to work-around a genuinely buggy piece of software. Developers' understanding of this area is pretty weak on average, so test and undo any tweaking they suggest if it doesn't help. Finally, make a note to undo your changes as soon as the software gets fixed: forgotten tweaking is one reason why people report miraculous speed-ups when they do a clean reinstall after a couple of years.

GrapeBotherhood said:
On a side note (or perhaps related to my issue?) since I bought the machine one month ago, it crashed on me and restarted 2 times, which is VERY weird for a mac
Click to expand...
A kernel panic isn't technically a crash, but you should still be able to find a report in the Console ("Applications", "Utilities" and opening the "Console" app, select "Crash Reports" in the left-hand pane.) Otherwise, next time it happens, open the report and copy-and-paste into a fresh document when it offers to send it to Apple. That report should tell you what it was doing when the panic occurred.
 
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