OpenCL vs. Cuda in the upcoming version

[Ryan Holmes]

Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but the Quadro K2000 is not a very high-end/powerful Nvidia card. That’s what AMD (or Tom’s Hardware) ran the test against. A K2000 only has 384 CUDA cores, even the Quadro K4000 has 768 CUDA cores, the newer Quadro K5000 has 1536 cores.

https://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-desktop-gpus.html

I’d take these test as more a marketing plug from AMD than real world, apples-to-apples comparison. Though I would expect the OpenCL integration to be better in this version of CS than in previous iterations. Adobe has every reason to support more cards and more configurations in order to increase market share.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Ryan Holmes] “I’d take these test as more a marketing plug from AMD than real world, apples-to-apples comparison”

The 1st part does look true – TH basically published an ad (well, “manufacturer announcement”) masqueraded as original content.

The 2nd part – not necessarily so, as the comparison seems to be on price, not features. As such, it might be a perfectly legit apricots-to-apricots comparison despite the large disparity in memory bandwidth and the number of processing cores. Tim Kolb noted as much in his response.

That said, I too am curious about a comparison between two cards of similar performance regardless of price differential. Also: differences between OpenCL and CUDA for the purpose of GPU acceleration in upcoming CS: what’s accelerated and what’s not.

If OpenCL does get a nice boost in GPU acceleration in CS, that’d be great news for a lot of people, especially on a Mac, don’t you think?

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Ryan Holmes]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “If OpenCL does get a nice boost in GPU acceleration in CS, that’d be great news for a lot of people, especially on a Mac, don’t you think?”

It certainly won’t hurt. But that will really be for older Mac’s.

The only Mac’s sold today with ATI cards is the nearly 3 year old Mac Pro (which is rumored to be getting an update this year….or it could be dead!). The other computers use Intel Integrated graphics or Nvidia cards. And this is likely why the FCP X team pushed so quickly to get updates out for FCP X to shore up their Nvidia card support as it wasn’t very strong upon first release.

All of my shop’s Mac Pro’s, save for 1 of them, run Quadro cards of some sort. From what I’ve seen, admittedly this is entirely anecdotal, the CUDA technology has been far superior to OpenCL. But this may be changing (or at least closing the gap) in the near future. Good move for Adobe, but I’m probably sticking with Nvidia cards as much as possible since there technology seems to be the primary driver of more software apps that I use (Premiere, Resolve, etc.)

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost