Single or dual GPU?

[Walter Soyka]

[Daniel Albers] “At this moment i got the dual gtx 460 running in non SLI. Is it smart for After Effects and Premiere Pro to sell those and buy one new graphics card?”

Ae CS6 is capable of using multiple CUDA GPUs for ray-tracing acceleration, with the caveat that it will treat all cards as if they had the same amount of RAM as the card with the lowest amount. For example, if you have one GPU with 4 GB of RAM and one GPU with 2 GB, Ae will only use 2 GB of RAM on each GPU.

Premiere Pro CS6 does not benefit from multiple GPUs (except in the very specific Maximus configuration — Quadro/Tesla).

Per the official Adobe sneak peak [link], the next version of Premiere Pro will support multiple GPUs.

There are some good Ae GPU benchmarks out there, like the one from Juan Salvo and Danny Princz [link], and there’s a whole site dedicated to Pr benchmarks [link]. My guess is that your Ae performance would be roughly comparable to what you have now if you were to upgrade to say a GTX 680. You’d see a boost in Pr CS6 performance since it only supports a single GPU, and there’s no data yet on what you’d see with the next version of Pr.

SLI doesn’t boost CUDA computation, so no worries there.

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

[Todd Kopriva]

Walter has given you a lot of good information. One more thing for you to read is this page, which gives details of exactly what is (and, more important, what isn’t) processed by the GPU in After Effects:
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2012/05/gpu-cuda-opengl-features-in-after-effects-cs6.html

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[John Mullens]

Needing to beef up without buying a Z820……..Here is my current system………
• An HP Z800 workstation with two Intel Hex-Core Xeon X5679 (12 cores at 3.2 GHz each with Hyperthreading to 24 cores) with two High-Performance HP Heatsinks
• An 1100 Watt High Output Power Supply with Built-in Self Test
• Full 48GB new HP Branded PC3-10600 DDR3 ECC RAM (12 x 4GB DIMMs)
• A new 500GB 7,200 RPM SATA Drive
• one new 1TB 7,200 RPM SATA Drives
• An HP nVidia Quadro 4000 Graphics Adapter with 2GB memory
• An HP DVD±RW Dual-Layer Drive and a DVD ROM Drive
I will be running Adobe CC on this system, Sony Vegas 12, and Divenci Resolve
I am not a tech guy or computer wiz. I am a graphic designer/photographer wanting to get into more of the video editing side of the game. I have been a freelance designer/photographer for over 12 years and this is one of the best systems I have ever owned. However with ever-changing technology, I want to make sure I am upgrading for the immediate future. I have been looking at the Adobe Maximus Configuration and adding a NVIDIA Tesla C2075 to my system. This seems to be a simple addition, most cost effective and increased power. After doing more research I keep reading articles about Newer graphic cards such as. Quadro K2000 and GeForce GTX-680 with alot more cuda cores, which should (as I was told) eliminates the need for the Maximus Configuration. I am in desparate need for some advice on making the video editing edition as painless as possible. I forgot to mention money is an object……..LOL!