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Dec 2nd – Where is my new Mac Pro and updated FCPX?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “There was a prerelease version of the MacPro, but it fetched a rather high price:
https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/null-n09014/lot.27.html“
And, I’m really enjoying using it, though I AM thinking of painting it black. It has a few quirks that I can’t share with you because of the NDA, but if I decide to buy Apple too, I’ll just quash that thing, and spill the details.
And, no–there will not be a twelve core before 01/01/2014, because I bought all the available chips to use in necklaces for my many friends. Sorry.
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[Marcus Moore] “I remember hearing that Adobe’s OpenGL performance has improved dramatically, making the no-CUDA card option less damning. But I cannot remember where I heard that.
“That’s sort of the general buzz I’ve heard, too, but I’m not sure of the reality.
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[Chris Harlan] “And, no–there will not be a twelve core before 01/01/2014, because I bought all the available chips to use in necklaces for my many friends. Sorry.”
I have heard silicon necklaces are all the rage this holiday season.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I have heard silicon necklaces are all the rage this holiday season.
“Hey, I’ll put you on the list, brother.
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It’s the same sort of general buzz about RED footage and GPU acceleration we’ve been hearing for months. It will be interesting to see what comes of all the rumours.
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[Chris Harlan] “[Bill Davis] “Andy is just me back in the first months. He sees people working overtime to belittle something that he finds interesting and valuable. And he’s annoyed when people can’t seem to look beyond their pre-conceptions – even when given evidence that some of those pre-conceptons have been long proven wrong.”
I think you should think better of yourself. I do.”
good god yes.
I’m personally convinced Andy branner is in fact: either Andy Kaufman in vegas lounge mode, typing from inside an iron lung, or Tim Wilson playing with our tiny minds.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “or Tim Wilson playing with our tiny minds”
Now, there’s that!
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[Marcus Moore] “I hope my info isn’t bogus. Last thing I want is presenting false info.
“Dude, you’ve been quite responsible. No worries.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “…or Tim Wilson playing with our tiny minds.”
And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddlin’ kids!
Shawn
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[Chris Harlan] “Is GFX AE? If so, do we have a sense of AE’s performance on those ATI cards?”
[Marcus Moore] “I remember hearing that Adobe’s OpenGL performance has improved dramatically, making the no-CUDA card option less damning. But I cannot remember where I heard that.”
There are a few ways that Ae uses the GPU, and it gets a little confusing.
In the past, Ae had an optional and limited OpenGL renderer. It was only ever intended for very fast, low quality previews, and starting with CS6, it’s gone.
Currently, Ae uses OpenGL for Fast Draft mode (a speedy alternate to the ray-tracer, which I’ll cover in a moment). OpenGL is also used for accelerating screen drawing of UI elements, displaying color management output simulation, and using the exposure controls in the viewer.
In CS6, a new ray-tracing renderer was added. The ray-tracing renderer is not the traditional After Effects renderer. It allows you to extrude text/shape layers, bend footage layers, use environment maps, and create materials which react somewhat realistically to light with true reflections, refraction, and cast shadows. This renderer does not allow blend modes, track mattes, layer styles on any layer, and it does not allow masks or effects on text, shape, or continuously rasterized layers, or on precomps with collapsed transformations.
This is the renderer which offers CUDA acceleration. If no appropriate NVIDIA card is available, the ray-tracing renderer will fall back to a much slower CPU-only mode. Fast Draft previews via OpenGL is available here as above, but this is not a rendering solution.
This ray-tracing renderer is built on an NVIDIA library called OptiX. Support for OpenCL acceleration would only be available for this specific feature if NVIDIA rewrote OptiX to not require CUDA, or if Adobe rewrote the ray-tracing renderer to not require OptiX. As an aside, the commercial availability of high-level libraries like OptiX is a big part of why CUDA has been so much more successful than OpenCL to date: it’s just plain easier to develop for.
TL;DR — any modern GPU will provide Ae the OpenGL acceleration that it uses; a CUDA card is recommended but not required if you want to make use of one specific feature, the ray-tracing renderer.
I am not seeing enough use of the ray-tracing renderer to consider an NVIDIA GPU to be a real-world requirement. I’ve used the ray-tracer on several projects I produced, but I have yet to do an externally-produced agency project with it. The ray-tracing renderer is painfully limited in a few really important ways, so CINEMA 4D is almost always a better solution (especially now that C4D LITE and CINEWARE are bundled with Ae CC).
It’s worth noting that plugins may use the GPU. Ae’s own built-in Cartoon effect is OpenGL accelerated. Third-party plugins like Red Giant Software Looks is OpenGL-accelerated. Some software like GenArts Sapphire is CUDA accelerated. Video Copilot Element 3D uses OpenGL and requires a GPU for rendering, and Mettle ShapeShifter/FreeForm Pro use a combination of OpenGL and OpenCL and also require a GPU for rendering.
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
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