I’ll make no claim to be a master at it, but I have Podium, and I’m (embarrassing long story) still stuck on an old 2012 MacBook Pro 15", 2.6 Ghz, 8 GB Ram, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB card, that’s also got a bad case of “Staingate”. I just got pushed into my first foray into artificial lighting in Podium for a project with a colleague, and achieved good results. The renders were generally 10 minutes or maybe 20, but not hours. The biggest factor for speed is sheer size: I didn’t make anything larger than 1920x1024. I’m not even using the most current version (2.5 vs. 2.6), and I think they recently announced they have multi-threading, which, I guess they weren’t doing before?
All said, I am interested in other renders, but I can’t say I’ve completely exhausted what Podium can do yet.
Edit: previously posted examples from Podium with the above hardware: