Dune 2 - I'm speechless, what have they done

[grs]

Firstly, it is a stress test like the one you mentioned with Massive. It is the same patch playing a held note,, you turn down the volume of the track to like almost nothing and then duplicate it.
"Usable instances" refers to the one patch over and over. "Usable" relates to how many instances will be duplicated until live peeks over 100% usually you hear crackling around 90% to 95%.
just make the same note on the same patch (BA Octava, to be a comparrison to my results) playing at the same time in cubase and see if you can get to 25.
I used an F below middle C held for two bars with a tempo of 77. loop that 2 bars and copy that midi into every Spire track.
To measure I used windows task manager process view and put update speed on low. After turning on each instance I wrote down the cpu usage in windows task manager for the process of the DAW and the cpu usage in Ableton Live top right corner.