iMac or MacPro ?

[Michael Szalapski]

There aren’t really any issues with Adobe and AMD GPU’s. When Premiere Pro initially introduced the Mercury Playback Engine, it only worked with certain NVIDIA cards, but AMD cards work with it now too (you’ll have to check Premiere Pro’s requirements if you plan to use it to be sure the cards you’re looking at work with it).

Stock After Effects barely uses the GPU at all. The only thing it really accelerates with the GPU is the ray-traced renderer. That, however, is considered obsolete, so I wouldn’t worry about it. It did rely on a very specific set of NVIDIA GPU’s, but again, there are some much more powerful options for 3d built into AE now.

Now, Element 3d, Red Giant’s Universe, and some of the other third-party effects do use the GPU a lot. But you’ll have to look at their specific requirements which are independent of AE’s.

In the current version of After Effects, the clock speed of the processor is more important than the number of cores.

Since your machines are pretty identical other than the number of cores, I’d say you’d get better value for your money with the iMac.

As the AE team rebuilds the core code to improve interactivity and rendering speed in new versions (WHICH IS SUPER-EXCITING, BY THE WAY), AE’s requirements may change, but for right now, those two machines would likely get pretty similar performance with stock AE. Again, you’ll have to check with any third parties for which GPU solution works best.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

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