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Display tearing in CS 6 persists – anyone else experiencing this?
Hi all,
I posted about this issue before, and have also cross-posted to the Adobe forums. I am experiencing severe display tearing/refresh rate issues in AE CS6. These issues happen regardless of whether or not I am playing back from the timeline, or merely panning around. Even slow panning around in the composition window results in very obvious tearing. (screen tearing – wikipedia)
Since I last posted, I purchased and installed an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 from MacVidCards. The card works perfectly in all aspects of OS X, and in all other programs, but the screen tearing is still there in After Effects. I installed Nvidia drivers, CUDA developer drivers, and also tried adding the card to the list of raytrace supported cards, but none of these things helped.
(As an aside, the card works beautifully for GPU accelerated raytracing, despite being unsupported for that purpose, once it has been manually added to the raytracer_supported_cards.txt file)
I tested in both 10.7.3 and 10.7.4. I also created a clean fresh install of 10.7.1 on a new drive, and installed CS 6 from scratch, with no plugins or any OS modifications. No difference.
A friend with a newer 12-core Mac Pro tried AE CS 6 under Snow Leopard with the same card, and experienced the same problem. When he booted into Windows 7 on the same machine, again with the same card, the issues were entirely gone.
Machine: Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 16 gb ram
Is anyone else experiencing this issue? It strikes me that this must be conflict or bug in Adobe’s handling of the GPU drivers on Mac OS.
Thanks for reading!
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17 Replies
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Hi Perry, sorry to hear that your issues have not gone away.
BTW, the GTX470 is supported natively/automatically by AE and PPro. From what I’ve read Mac OS 10.6.8 seems the most stable Mac OS for AE CS6.
Cheers
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
Yes, the GTX 470 is theoretically supported, just not for ray-tracing. When I spoke of it being unsupported, I meant only in the ray-tracing capacity. Which is easily fixed via the text file hack I mentioned.
The Snow Leopard system I tested on was 10.6.8 – and runs a very smooth operation normally with DaVinci Resolve, etc., all finely tuned. Still had the exact same problem there.
Does anyone know if there is a way to email Adobe support, or at least talk to a high-level engineer right away on the phone?
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[Perry Kroll] “Yes, the GTX 470 is theoretically supported, just not for ray-tracing. When I spoke of it being unsupported, I meant only in the ray-tracing capacity. Which is easily fixed via the text file hack I mentioned.”
Hmmmm, AFAIK the 470 doesn’t require any fix for ray-tracing support. Which text file, specifically, are you editing and what is the actual text that you have types in?
Cheers
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
i would also contact the macvid guys… they are responsible for the modifications that allow the gtx470 to run on osx, so they may have some input.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Ray-tracing supported cards in CS6
Before I edited the text file, GPU rendering of ray-traced elements was disabled, and CPU rendering was very slow.
Once I edited the file, GPU rendering was enabled, and it was blazingly fast.
On OS X the file is stored inside the app bundle, and the path is:
/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS6/Adobe After Effects CS6.app/Contents/raytracer_supported_cards.txt
I simply added the line: “GeForce GTX 470”
So now it reads:
GeForce GTX 285
GeForce GTX 470
Quadro CX
Quadro FX 4800
Quadro 4000 -
Thanks Kevin. I have contacted them, and I’ll report back if we get anywhere.
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thanks, i’m really curious to see how well the mac flashed pc cards cards will work out with adobe’s software.
i know initially most people were flashing cards for gaming, and you could live with a some screen issues, and maybe that would be ok for previews too, but not for final rendering.
it would also be nice if apple and nvidia see that there is a market for these flashed cards, and decided to expand the mac video card market… i mean, just 4 cuda cards… really?
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
[Kevin Camp] “i know initially most people were flashing cards for gaming, and you could live with a some screen issues, and maybe that would be ok for previews too, but not for final rendering.”
AE’s ray tracer uses NVIDIA GPUs for numerical calculations (via CUDA and the OptiX engine).
This is totally different than image-based manipulations (such as via OpenGL) where the image quality may vary depending upon the implementation.
Ray tracer renderers should be identical regardless of whether they are done on the GPU or the CPU, and regardless of which (supported) GPU they were calculated on.
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 -
My bad Perry – I forgot that you’re on a Mac. I hope things work out for you.
Cheers
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
[Walter Soyka] “Ray tracer renderers should be identical regardless of whether they are done on the GPU or the CPU, and regardless of which (supported) GPU they were calculated on.”
that’s right.
perry, does the tearing still happen if your switch cpu rendering on osx?
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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