Cubase 12: Kontakt 6 performance issues.

xphen0m

I just built a new PC. Not even two weeks old. Works beautifully…however…I’m using Cubase 12.0.3 at the moment. Kontakt 6 is an issue here. When the Kontakt track is record armed, and either playing back midi or especially inputting midi, there’s horrible rapid Asio spikes. Unarming the track and then playing back does not present any issues. This actually seems to be the only issue I have with Cubase 12, other than this, it works fine.

After using 12 for a while, I installed C11. This issue is not happening in Cubase 11.

Was any possible solution ever found for this? I searched through the many threads about C12 performance issues on Steinberg's forum, but a solution might be buried in the many results that come through searching. So I figured I'd ask here.

Specs:

i5-12600k

Windows 11

Main drive is a 1 TB Western Digital SSD

32 GB RAM

Kontakt samples are all on a 2 TB Samsung SSD

EvilDragon

Try setting Kontakt's multicore processing option to something other than "off". Also try disabling ASIO Guard in Cubase.

soapmak3r

I forwarded some performance traces to Steinberg regarding the performance and stability issues that I was having, and they have said that Kontakt appears to be the issue.

They asked to forward the traces to Native Instruments, which I agreed to, but that was several months ago, and there have been no Kontakt 6 updates.

This is what Steinberg replied to me, regarding the performance traces:

"Quick heads up: the traces were very helpful, thanks again. In the second state (after performance decrease), the overall load is just slightly higher (~4%), but the audio processing is much more disturbed by Kontakt doing cache read/write activity.

This can have several reasons - bad memory handling, small storage space, other hardware related areas.

The OS prioritizes hardware requests over applications - which can lead to our audio processing having to wait until the kernel is done with the cache IO. We have to take a look into this with a Native Instruments developer.

Would it be ok for you if we share your traces with NI?

Cheers"

soapmak3r

https://youtu.be/wcHN_XeTryg

Here is a video of the issue that you are describing, which was what I initially forwarded to Steinberg. I sent Steinberg a performance trace of before the issues manifested, and another after the issue manifested itself. The issue would only happen when the track was 'armed'.

The issue gets even worse if I open the note editor while the track is armed. Then things go really crazy. Click off the track and close the note editor, and performance returns to normal.

There are clearly some serious bugs with Kontakt 6 in Cubase 12, and I hope that Native Instruments address them in Kontakt 6, and don't just abandon it for Kontakt 7 without fixing it.

EvilDragon

Did you try what I suggested? Were there any differences?

I find it a bit strange that things work fine for you in C11 but not C12, which would point at the issue being more on the Steinberg side, to be honest...