Reply To: disastrous CPU performance

Sure would like to know the real facts/hard specs on what you guys are running, because as one said above, a few extra percentage points of CPU is more than welcomed to have such a well-conceived and inviting interface. After a few hours of staring at my former Cubase layout and its weird pastels, unnatural colorations, and uncustomizable screen, 8+ hours of looking at Podium is now a real blessing.

I’m routinely seeing only about 3-4% extra CPU for the UI on Podium, and I’m using a very average Core2Duo. If you are assessing usuage via the standard Task Manager, that will be vague and largely a waste of time. Get the Microsoft-endorsed FREE Process Explorer from SysInternals at technet.microsoft and it even offers the spiffy option of replacing your Task Manager if you wish. It can easily be configured to show all trees and handles in any live process. THEN you will know what’s really going on and what the real culpret is. I find that Podium uses slightly less resources than my last edition of Cubase, also, and just a tad more than REAPER, although it must be said that REAPER uses CPU resources quite differently (more upfront, less down the line usually).

Spikes can be caused by denormal issues with a few pesky VSTs. Do you have digitalfishphones’ normalizer.dll? That’s free, too, and will take care of that separate issue.

Podium runs like a charm in my case, but I point out that I set my Preferences and optimize my laptop very, very carefully to achieve great performance. Daws are not plug’n’play. It’s all in the sample rates, buffer settings and those little check boxes that often get ignored. I spent an entire two days right after the install getting things perfect. It was worth every second.

Finally, it’s easy to search this one out on the Net: Almost all of the DAWs out there these days have been tested and compared and rated for resource usuage — charts, graphs, comments, etc. There are a good dozen blogs/forums that discuss this stuff ad nauseum. There are several worse offenders than Podium, a few are far worse. This is all public info — no deep secret at all.

To make a blanket statement declaring Podium a “resource hog” without posting stats, specs, and maybe a screen shot or two is a real “stretch” to say the very least. My mileage, as I noted, is far different. I realize particular PCs have their own quirks and issues, but an internet search of this doesn’t support the claim either. Instead, several other big-name programs come up regularly. Good luck.