More hot quad action!

impressions after the first couple of days

I’ve spent most of the weekend installing my software, so I haven’t been working on a new album or DVD project yet to talk about the performance in that respect. I did have to run my own personal benchmark though, heavy-duty Reaktor ensembles. If you are unfamiliar with Reaktor, it is a visual programming tool for creating modular software sythesizers. On my 12″ G4 867 MHz laptop, I can’t run the Heiddegger or Leviathan3 ensembles from the Reaktor user library at all. Firstly, they don’t even fit on the screen. Secondly, even throttled down to the lowest sample rates, they immediately max out my CPU. I can happily report that at 44 Khz and the highest quality settings, Leviathan barely makes my CPUs notice its existence at a paltry 12% CPU usage. Heiddegger maxes out around 28% but seems to be constantly spinning between 20%-28% (I don’t know if Reaktor knows how to measure 4 CPUs). Both ensembles show OS X thread scheduling is well done, Activity Monitor shows that Reaktor’s 7 threads are spread pretty evenly across the CPUs.

My only real complaint so far is with the Mighty Mouse which has already begun to squeak when I click. This is destined to be immediately replaced by something less annoying. Sorry Apple mouse guys…

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