GTX980Ti or Quadro K5000?

[Tero Ahlfors]

AE won’t get much out of a GPU. Some plugins might. I wouldn’t buy an expensive GPU only for AE. If you’re using Premiere and/or Resolve then go ahead.

[Michael Oates]

Thanks Dave. I happen to have a version of AE version 5.5 and might try that as well. I did speak to someone at Adobe at a recent show in NYC who claimed that AE Version 6 has this capability.

However, the problem is really more of a driver problem. Apparently the Nvidia Mac Driver for the K5000 Quadro card is the last “real” Mac Cuda Core driver that Nvidia produced….other than for the GTX680.

The K5000 has 1536 cores and is a true rendering card—not a gaming card. The 980TI is really more of a gaming card, and with its 2800+ cores, it could challenge the K5000 is set up properly for rendering work. I believe Nvidia has avoided producing the proper Mac Driver for this new card, other than the Web Driver software they offer for it.

I am hoping some third party figures out a way (develops a driver) to access those cores for rendering purposes on a Mac. We’ll see. Thanks for the tip.

[Michael Oates]

Any thoughts on a different (better) card that will accelerate AE rendering?

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Oates] “Any thoughts on a different (better) card that will accelerate AE rendering?”

The only rendering that’s accelerated by CUDA on the GPU in Ae is the ray-tracing renderer, which is due for replacement [link].

Ae does have some GPU-accelerated draw calls to the screen for the UI, but it’s not a big deal and nearly any card will do. See here for more:
After Effects Help / GPU (CUDA, OpenGL) features [link]

Dave’s right-on talking about multiprocessing as your best solution for faster renders. Can you describe your system specs and what version of Ae you’re actually using?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Michael Oates]

Walter:

I have a MacPro 12 core 3.46GHz (5.1), 32GB RAM, and running 10.10.5
The card is an EVGA 980TI.

With this card, I am using all the PCIE slots.

Any additional addvice?

[Michael Oates]

Sorry…here’s the AE info.

I have AE 5.5 installed.
I also have the latest AE CC (2015).

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Oates] “I have a MacPro 12 core 3.46GHz (5.1), 32GB RAM, and running 10.10.5… I have AE 5.5 installed. I also have the latest AE CC (2015).”

When you say AE 5.5, I assume you mean Ae CS 5.5, which was AE v10.5 from 2011. There have been a great many enhancements since then, including the Global Performance Cache in CS6. But which version should you pick?

After Effects is in transition right now. In Ae CC 2014 and prior, Ae’s performance was seriously limited by its underlying architecture, with some concepts dating back 20+ years. Ae CC 2015 is a major re-architecture designed to address these limitations in a modern way without altering the user experience, but it’s still a work-in-progress.

My suggestions for better performance on your system:

Use a more recent version of Ae. Personally, my studio uses a mix of 2015 and 2014. We use mainly use 2015 for the big interactivity improvements, but jump back to 2014 for multiprocessing rendering or if anything gets weird. (Ae 2014 and 2015 use the exact same project file format, so you can bounce back and forth between versions with the same AEP files.)

Buy more RAM. You can get 64 GB of memory from Other World Computing for $360. More RAM will let you take better advantage of multiprocessing on Ae CC 2014 and lower.

Enable multiprocessing, leaving about a quarter of your RAM free for other applications, and allocating 3-4 GB or more per background process.

Buy an SSD, and use it for the cache. When Ae renders a frame for preview and caches that frame and its layers it in RAM, it also (eventually) caches them to disk. As you’re working, if Ae detects that it’s already rendered a given layer-frame, and if it’s faster to read from the disk than it is to recalculate, Ae will grab the render back from disk. To take advantage of this and avoid re-rendering the same exact work over and over, you need a fast disk like an SSD.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Michael Oates]

Thanks Walter…..it sounds like I am partially there. I use SSDs allmost exclusively for this work.

At this point, I need to
1. increase my RAM and
2. look into how to download AE CC 2014 (I imagine I can find it on the Adobe Site.

My only question is whether the additional RAM is really worth it……I rarely top it out, although I do run AVID Media Composer at the same time—-bouncing between that and AE.

Mike

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Oates] “My only question is whether the additional RAM is really worth it……I rarely top it out, although I do run AVID Media Composer at the same time—-bouncing between that and AE.”

Once you enable multiprocessing, you will.

Multiprocessing works by launching multiple instances of the Ae renderer. Each one needs its own space in RAM for its own separate copy of the project file, its own copy of the footage, its own caches, etc. Your ability to effectively use your CPU will be limited by your available RAM with Ae’s old multiprocessing design.

Less RAM means launching fewer instances of the renderer, lengthening your render times. Less RAM means each render instance has less space for caching, which means more slow disk access instead of fast RAM access for footage references.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Michael Oates]

Walter and Dave:

thanks os much for thelp. I’ve ordered additional RAM from OWC….will now check out the link Dave referred me to.
I’ll report back once I figure all this out (and get more RAM)…..should be in about a week.

Thanks and Happy New Year!