Fading Audio is ROUGH on CPUs

Audio fading operations can cause severe CPU performance degradation due to subnormal floating-point numbers. When audio volume is gradually reduced, calculations slip into the subnormal range, which can cost hundreds of additional clock cycles per operation. This issue affected major DAWs in the early 2000s with Intel's Pentium 4. The problem stems from the IEEE 754 floating-point standard, which introduced gradual underflow through subnormals for arithmetic precision. While this provides mathematical accuracy, it creates significant computational overhead. Modern audio software typically disables subnormal calculations by default, flushing tiny numbers to zero to maintain performance without perceptible audio quality loss.