Problem
As soon as the Cubase/Nuendo user interface is pushed to the background, audio dropouts could happen during playback, depending on the project's overall processing load. Even a restart of the audio engine ("emergency stop") may occur.
Reason
In this instance, the hybrid architecture CPU's efficiency cores—rather than its performance cores—are scheduled to handle the so-called prefetch threads (for more information, see this article on ASIO Guard). As the efficiency cores do not provide enough performance, the dropouts may occur.
Solution
A command line to exclude Cubase/Nuendo from this automatic assignment is available.
- Please open the Terminal as an administrator by right-clicking the Windows Start logo in the taskbar and choosing "Terminal (Admin)".
- For Cubase 15, enter:
powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 15\Cubase15.exe" - Modify the path and executable depending on the application and its version.
- To check the configuration, enter powercfg /powerthrottling LIST
In the example, Cubase 15 should be listed - To reset the setting, enter:
powercfg /powerthrottling reset /path "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 15\Cubase15.exe"