[smoke]

Originally Posted by Sascha Franck

Well (more or less obviously, for a tech nerd like me), I do of course have the latest drivers for everything installed. And regarding the kind of projects, the problems already start to appear with one single VSTi and just one track - as said, one single instance of Zebra 2 using the default patch is already resulting in quite some problems. High CPU load, graphic glitches and crackles.
And I can play several instances of the very same patch in Logic.

Sure, once I raise my buffersize, things are getting a lot better (the graphic issues aren't, though), but that's clearly not in my interest as I'm a guitar player, so I like to use some amp sim plugins - and with something around 10.5ms of overall (carefully measured) system latency (audio in to audio out that is), anything higher wouldn't be exactly desireable anymore.

As said, this is a very wellknown problem with Cubase on Macs (and partially as well under Windows, other hosts allow for low latencies under high CPU load as well), something that seems to exists since quite some years already. Everything is fine once you raise your buffersizes. But in case you want/need to work with the lowest possible buffersizes, the problems arise. Along the same lines: It's quite common knowledge that Cubase users often raise their buffer sizes once it comes to mixing, simply because you can get a lot better performance out of it in that case. And well, that's in fact not an issue of Cubase vs. Logic on Macs, but it has always been like that. Even back with Logic 5.5.1/Win, the differences in CPU load when using high vs. low buffer sizes were rather minimal whereas with Cubase they were more than just noticeable, sometimes even like night and day.

Fwiw, feel free to forward those Steinberg folks my mail adress, I'd be more than happy to help them out or at least elaborate things a bit further. It's s(dot)franck(at)gmx(dot)de.
I could as well re-sign up to Cubase.net or so, but I lost my old account details years ago (due to a changing mail adress and some (fortunately otherwise irrelevant) backup HDD ****up), so I haven't felt too much of a need so far.

In case someone's interested, I could as well come up with a few testing scenarios. Such as using the very same audio/MIDI files and the very same plugins under either host. I'd bet the differences would be quite more than noticeable.

Cheers
Sascha

Yeah, Cubase on Macintosh doesn't like complex synth programming, doesn't like convolution, amp modelers... these sort of things tax my system immediately. Basically with Mac Cubase, the CPU meters determine what you can have in your project. You learn how to get by with just a few instruments. It would be nice to see how it feels to actually layer 7 synths, run an amp, and have 3 REVerences going. But no way in hell that's happening here, and I'm all updated as well. That's quite an insult from them... are they not aware of the issues Mac users have? People complain about it at Cubase.net. Is anyone reading over there?

I'd be willing to do some tests. Would be good to get some solid numbers and stats rather than come off ranting.