CS6 GPU Question

[Kevin Camp]

i can only speculate that the pro level card will be more stable under heavy usage.

i have heard of a user who had used a gtx285, had frequent issues and switched to the quadro 4000 and it was much more stable. performance is about the same between those two cards (about the same number of cores), but there is obviously something more in the quadro series to help it perform under heavy usage, and that’s probably what increases the price.

i had met some nvidia engineers a few years ago just before premiere pro introduced the mercury playback engine, and they echoed that point, while the gaming cards worked fairly well, they found that when you really stressed the card with the mercury engine, the pro series held up well, while the gaming cards would start to have issues.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Chandra]

I actually just asked about this too. In my research and talking with people it seems the Quadro 4000 is the best bang for the buck, especially if you intend to use the new CS6 Ray trace features.

https://www.nvidia.com/object/premiere-pro-cs6.html

I would love anyones input on this. I noticed John Dickinson of Motionworks was also using this card when he was demoing the new ray-trace feature.

Thanks!

[Todd Kopriva]

We do hear the suggestion from the Nvidia folks that the Quadro cards are more durable under heavy usage, but we also have seen some benchmark tests (here on the COW) that make the GTX cards look like they deliver great performance for the price.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
product manager, professional video software
After Effects team blog
Premiere Pro team blog
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[Walter Soyka]

[Kevin Camp] “i have heard of a user who had used a gtx285, had frequent issues and switched to the quadro 4000 and it was much more stable.”

That might have been me [link].

It’s entirely possible that my GTX285 was just faulty, and those were dark times for NVIDIA drivers on OS X. I didn’t do a lot of troubleshooting — I just did a lot of cursing before replacing the card with the Quadro 4000. Which only led to more cursing when Apple released 10.6.7 which removed the NVIDIA Quadro drivers and wouldn’t boot…

On the Windows side, and even with my GTX285/Quadro 4000 experience above, I would not personally buy a Quadro 2000 over a GTX680 today, unless you specifically need Quadro features for another application. The Ae performance metrics aren’t even close. As the Quadro 6000 test I contributed to Juan Salvo’s and Danny Princz’s benchmark shows, the bang for the buck with the high-end cards vs the GTX series with Ae/Pr is dismal.

Remember, though, the graphics card only comes into play with Ae for the ray tracing renderer and select third-party effects. It will not accelerate classic 3D rendering or most of the built-in effects.

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

[Kevin Camp]

it was you, walter 🙂

if i was buying a card for myself to accelerate the new raytracing feature, i would buy a gtx card. with the primary reason being price (or price per performance). if i encountered stability issues, i’d probably look into improving the cooling system on the card, which doesn’t cost too much. and if i still had issues, i’d just sell it and upgrade at that point… you probably wouldn’t lose much in that situation.

now if i was getting my company to purchase cards for our machines, i’d may go after the quadros. in part because i don’t want to have to trouble shoot other co-workers machines, nor would i want to go back to my boss and say we made the wrong decision, and now we need to spend more money — and it’s a bit of an accounting nightmare to deal with selling things and then trying to keep that money in our department.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Michael Garske]

I have been doing some exhaustive research on the 500 and 600 series GTX cards. Unfortunately it would seem that the GPU rendering isn’t improved from the 500 series and is actually diminished greatly from the GTX 580.

Here’s what I found:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/406
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/17

Also, AMD cards aren’t supported by After Effects on Windows 7 correct? Some of their cards trounce Nvidia on bench marks and I’d like to look into getting one of those.

At this time I’m considering a GTX 580 3Gb but it would be nice to go with a newer card. Does anyone have experience with any of these cards?

[Todd Kopriva]

> Also, AMD cards aren’t supported by After Effects on Windows 7 correct?

That’s not correct.

There’s only one feature in After Effects CS6 that requires a specific Nvidia card: the GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer. Every other GPU feature in After Effects CS6 works on AMD cards.

Details are here:
https://bit.ly/aftereffects_cs6_gpu

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
product manager, professional video software
After Effects team blog
Premiere Pro team blog
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[Walter Soyka]

[Todd Kopriva] “There’s only one feature in After Effects CS6 that requires a specific Nvidia card: the GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer. Every other GPU feature in After Effects CS6 works on AMD cards.”

And just for a little further clarification: the ray-traced 3D renderer also has a CPU-only mode which does not require any specific graphics card. This produces identical results to the GPU-accelerated mode, but it’s significantly slower.

If you plan on doing a lot of ray-tracing in Ae, a qualified NVIDIA GPU is highly recommended.

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

[Michael Garske]

Ah, thanks for that information. Does anyone know if there is a significant difference between nvidia and AMD when it comes to GPU rendering? This website seems to favor the Radeon HD 7970 by quite a bit.

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/406

Is anyone using this card? Would it make a good match for After Effects? (raytrace aside)

[Walter Soyka]

Those benchmarks are for SmallLux GPU renderer only, which computes with OpenCL. They have nothing to do with the After Effects ray tracer, which computes with OptiX on CUDA.

Check out Juan Salvo and Danny Princz’s AE/GPU benchmarks [link] (which Todd linked to earlier).

Please note these benchmarks are specific to CS6’s new ray-tracing renderer. Some third-party effects like Sapphire may be CUDA enabled, but others like Optical Flares or Element 3D can also process on the GPU via OpenGL.

Normal 2D and Classic 3D rendering in After Effects is all on the CPU, and the GPU doesn’t factor in at all.

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