Cubase More CPU Efficient Than Reaper?

That's pretty accurate, the main problem with the P3 will be the memory bandwidth of the 64-bit mixing. Once the number of tracks gets high enough, the machine just won't be able to move enough bytes. Basically if you want to be mixing 30 tracks on a P3, Reaper isn't the tool for the job. This isn't totally relevant, because the 64-bit issue is the throttle for your particular system, but Reaper is not designed for optimal performance in low-load, low-memory-bandwidth situations. Reaper tends to burn more CPU than necessary in low-load situations, but scale well to higher-load situations, especially on multicore systems (the analogy would be a fast engine using more gas when idling).

Reaper at low latencies on my quad core far out performs my nuendo 4. I know this doesn't help but just wanted to let you know it's probably the machine as stated (unfortunately) :(

Thanks, this makes sense. I asked the same thing on the Cubase.net forum and received pretty much the same explanation. Thanks for your replies!

For low end (single core) PCs,try this trick to improve performance: disable the anticipative multiprocessing in the preferences. You'll get much lower CPU usage (and lower latencies). Pentium III / Pentium IV CPUs are good for spreadsheets and integer number crunching jobs but very bad for multimedia (audio) processing,due to their extremely very weak FPU and SIMD units. Even the Pentium IV is extremely weak. A 'crappy' Athlon XP (SSE1) is 3 times faster than a Pentium IV with SSE2.

The system I tried it on has two Xeon dual-core processors. And the tip quoted reduced CPU usage by at least 50%

Cubase 5 and Reaper 3 here. Only use Reaper these days cause its much more stable, cpu-efficient and overal stable than Cubase. tried both on 32bit and 64bit Windows with the same result. know enough about DAW optimization to say for sure: Reaper is a lot more cpu efficient and stable.

Reaper is born after PIII family I think (around early 2004 as I remeber). My PIV is from mid 2003. Yes, supports SSE2 Reaper beats Cubase 3 at a heartbeat. synth, is it really Athlon XP more efficient than PIV or is it due to the OS behaviour and settings?!

I'm just starting to evaluate reaper after being a long time Cubase user. So far I'm seeing an incredible CPU improvement with Reaper compared with Cubase. That's assuming I'm reading the performance window in Reaper correctly. I've created 3 identical projects in Cubase and Reaper and the results are as follows 1. Cubase Idle 20%, playback 40%; reaper idle 5.5%, playback 11% 2. Cubase playback 20%, Reaper 5.5 3. Cubase playback 80%, Reaper 30%. Does the CPU meter in Reaper compare to Cubase's Asio meter? I've noticed that in the Task Manager in Windows 7 the CPU usage is about the same in both programs

Hi Ollie. Thanks for your reply. Thanks for confirming about the Win & task manager figures. I really pushed a project yesterday and noticed that the Cubase meter craps out way before the task manager figure does. This of course makes sense as the cubase meter is only telling you about Cubase. However, it seems there is more headroom available on the machine and I can take advantage of that using Reaper. Impressive :-) By the way, I;m not a Cubase basher. It's my day to day composing tool and it has some wonderful features. However, I'm always looking at ways of improving workflow / output and if I something else will do that then I have no hesitation about changing DAW's. If I do, it'll be a little while though. Always tricky when there's work on :-)