CS5.5 Dual GPU Support

[Iain Donham]

[Dave LaRonde] “No. AE gains nothing from even one Quadro 4000.”

What about Nvidia’s claim that their cards used with OpenGL accelerates performance with AE CS5.5.

https://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe_AftereffectsCS5.html

[Kevin Camp]

the key phrase in nvidia’s statement is it can help with ‘opengl gpu accelerated effects’, so that would be effects that are specifically designed to use the gpu (like knoll light factory and pixel blender effects).

it could also help with interacting with 3d scenes and with most blending modes in ae, but that’s really just for previewing as you manipulate a layer in a comp or scrub the timeline, and wouldn’t help in rendering… but many consumer grade cards could perform those accelerations about as well for a lot less money.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Iain Donham]

Ok so After Effects out of the picture, does the MPE and OpenGL acceleration for Premiere benefit from a second card?

[Iain Donham]

That makes sense, thanks for your input!

[Greg Estes]

Some quick points:
– CS5.5 isn’t multi-GPU in the sense that it takes advantage of two GPUs by spreading a task over both GPUs at the same time.
– CS5.5.2 does support an NVIDIA “Maximus” configuration with both a Quadro and a Tesla in the same workstation. The Premiere Pro CUDA work gets routed to the Tesla board, freeing up the Quadro for other stuff. The combination of a modest Quadro and Tesla C2075 (typical Maximus config) will cost less than a Quadro 6000 but offer about the same performance, so that may be interesting to high end users.
– Only a small portion of AE capabilities are GPU accelerated in CS5.5; that’s correct. Same for Photoshop. Premiere Pro is the heavy hitter in terms of GPU acceleration today.

[Andrew Somers]

The Gen Arts Sapphire suite (about 240 visual effects in the collection of plug ins) and the monsters suite, among others, are CUDA accelerated in After Effects. A CUDA card can be very useful as the CUDA gpu is used for accelerating rendering of these plug ins.

And nVidia’s CUDA cards are also OpenGL capable, so there is still benefit in After Effects for the non-CUDA capable operations.

CUDA and OpenGL are separate functions, and I have not heard or personally found any incompatibilities between CUDA and OpenGL.

CUDA is a general purpose parallel computing architecture. OpenGL is a cross platform API for graphics.