@Tweak: yes, I'm always interested in DSP related options. I'd love to see them come out with a PCI card that could run dedicated instances of Dune2. It seems once any device is placed outside the case, you just have one more cable component to introduce potential lag (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire etc) even if in theory they shouldn't.
@grs: Well I never noticed it but it seems as though Cubase limits me to 24 instrument tracks. That's more than I would need in a project (which explains why I haven't hit the limit) but it seems odd for their flagship product (this is not Cubase LE or one of the baby editions). I guess to really push it I would have to use a much more resource intensive patch.
My 870 is handling the 24 instances of Spire with BA Octaver fine enough (one note held down for 2 bars looped), with total usage in the 50-65% range depending on what I set as my buffer size on the Saffire audio interface software. My CPU usage in task manager pretty much reflects the visual bar in Cubase, 50-65% or so. The part I'm confused about is how you were able to see what each instance of Spire was using using Task Manager (or is that an Ableton thing?) Maybe I'm misunderstanding what numbers you were looking at?
I should note in terms of audio quality, all of this sounds like hell but because of muddiness caused by duplicating the same patch too many times (not the type of crackling that comes when the CPU is strained). It does pop a little at the beginning of the first bar, but I think this is because of the phases of the OSCs all kicking off at once.
The other interesting thing is that the demo of Spire is swooshing the white noise for all of these instances at varying intervals, which has to be creating a certain amount of overhead in itself. You can see the monitor for the noise varying on all the different tracks which is weird to observe.
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