AE / RAM CPU GPU query

[Vishesh Arora]

Chris

I agree with you but GPU is mainly used for Ray Tracing feature and some other few features
GPU (CUDA, OpenGL) features in After Effects.

It would not improve the Overall performance of AE.

Vishesh Arora
3D and Motion Graphics Artist
Films Rajendra

Blog:
https://digieffects.wordpress.com

2011 3D Demo Reel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHPgIJU_BR8

[Walter Soyka]

Vishesh is right. If you are doing a lot of ray-tracing in Ae, you want multiple GPUs. Check out the link in his post (visible on the forum, invisible in your email) for more. Also see Juan Salvo’s and Danny Princz’s AE ray trace engine/CUDA GPU performance comparison [link].

I would add that there are third-party effects that also make use of the GPU via OpenGL — FreeForm/ShapeShifter from Mettle, Optical Flares/Element from Video Copilot, Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant — but these will not benefit from multiple graphics cards. (Sapphire from GenArts, being CUDA accelerated, might benefit a bit — not sure there.)

In general, though, I’d point out that outside of the ray-tracer, the CPU does the vast majority of the computation in Ae, and I’d recommend a “balanced system” approach: the more CPUs you have, the more RAM you need to use them, the faster disk you need to use them, etc. Unbalanced systems are wasteful: there’s little sense in adding 64 GB of RAM on a four-thread system, or little sense getting dual eight-core Xeons if you’re only going to stock 8 GB of RAM.

Watch Activity Monitor (Mac) or Windows Task Manager’s Performance tab (Win). If your CPU utilization is full or very nearly full (and if you are not ray-tracing), then your system is bottlenecking at the CPU and more RAM or faster disks will not help.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ridley Walker]

As usual Walter provides a thorough, thoughtful response, to which I’d just add one comment. The bottlenecks that occur depend entirely on the nature of the work you’re doing.

If you’re reading and writing large files then disk i/o is important, using lots of effects or expressions then CPU speed is paramount, and of course both Vishesh and Walter mentioned Ray-tracing and other processes that take advantage of the GPU.

[Todd Kopriva]

You’ve been given a lot of good advice on this thread so far.

Here’s where I’ve collected information about hardware for optimum performance for Premiere Pro and After Effects: https://adobe.ly/pRYOuk

Pay special attention to the hardware white paper linked to from there; Chris Meyer wrote that, with a lot of input from us.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
———————————————————————————————————

[Chris Brett]

Hi there –

Many thanks for all the help on this one which has been very useful and much appreciated.

Still puzzled by the ‘ process multiple frames ‘ option though….

……does anyone know if this works simultaneously with all the other functions please ? — such as …..

……should this work on the same calculations at the same time as the CUDA cores when GPU is enabled and will this work when a RAM preview is being calculated ?

……. any thoughts on this one please ??

————— all the best ——-chris —

[Todd Kopriva]

Chris, information on that feature (including answers to your questions) is in After Effects Help, here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/memory-storage1.html#memory_multiprocessing_preferences

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
———————————————————————————————————

[Chris Brett]

Thanks Todd —

—- theres a lot of it to ‘get yer head round ‘ and i’m doing it a wee bit at a time to hopefully take it all in…

…………. much appreciated and best regards —chris brett—