Which Graphics Card for AE on Mac?

[David Bogie]

Don’t buy a card exclusively for AE. OpenGL is a cruel joke on the Mac. Before you go thinking OpenGL is useful, take a few hours to study the OpenGL development sites so you know how to read the (IMO deliberately misleading) specifications for graphics cards.

The state of the art on the Macintosh appears to be the nvidia 3870 (or is it 3780?) and this will offer improved performance in applications such as Apple’s Motion But if you’re an Adobe-only editor, your best bet is to study the AE specifications pages at Adobe’s marketing site.

NAB is coming up so wait to see if anyone announces new products.

bogiesan

[Chris Davis]

[bogiesan]
The state of the art on the Macintosh appears to be the nvidia 3870 (or is it 3780?) and this will offer improved performance in applications such as Apple’s Motion But if you’re an Adobe-only editor, your best bet is to study the AE specifications pages at Adobe’s marketing site…

Thanks for your response. Are you referring to the ATI 3870? Looks like that card is under $200. The Adobe site says that AE will use the Nvidia Quadro 5600 series, so it looks like the sky is the limit as to how much I could spend on a graphics card.

I’m open to any suggestions.

Don’t buy a card exclusively for AE. OpenGL is a cruel joke on the Mac…

The site does say, “On Mac OS X 10.5.3 or higher, some OpenGL accelerated effects may not render on selected cards. Until a solution is available, turn off OpenGL or disable the Accelerate Effects Using OpenGL option in the Previews Preferences.” So if Open GL won’t work with AE and a Mac, does AE still make much use of the graphics card (i.e. how much difference does the graphics card make with RT in AE?). I still want to use AE with Mac, and I want as much RT as possible.

-Chris

[Kevin Camp]

you will rarely ever get realtime in ae, it’s not designed to operate in realtime, it’s not even trying to be that type of application… heck, most users use uncompressed codecs that can’t even be played in realtime by most systems so if you’re compositing effects on top of that you’ll be hard pressed to get realtime… anyway back to the subject, you will get little all around benefit from the gpu in ae (there are some specific things the gpu will handle, but there are not a lot of effects that utilize the gpu).

in addition, with opengl acceleration enabled for previews (or renders), ae will not utilize multiprocessing… so if you have 8-cores and 16gb of ram, would you rather use 8-cores with 16gb of ram, or 1 gpu with 512mb of vram…?

the genral order of importance for ae in rendering is:

1. cpu — speed and number of cores is the primary factor in render times.
2. ram — ae can use up to 3.5gb per core on a mac, so if you have 8-cores ae will use nearly 32gb of ram, 2gb per core is recommended for efficient rendering, but comp size a bit-depth are some determining factors.
3. drives and drive bus speeds — as frames get bigger (hd 1920×1080) it takes longer to read, cache and write each frame, having fast drives and multiple fast drive busses can help streamline the data flow to the processors. allowing ae to use the system bus (internal drive) for the cache drive and an external bus (like sata2 external raid) for your media and renders will help speed up after effects.
4. gpu — the graphics card is last on the list for most ae users. i should also note that many ae users simply disable opengl in ae due to stability issues with opengl.

   if you’re after realtime, go with motion and get a good graphics card. in particular get one with a lot of vram. more vram will let you work with larger, more complex compositions in motion. note that as soon as you run out of vram, you run out of realtime in motion too.

   if you want two montiors, get two graphics cards. two montors plugged into the same card split the vram, so if you want motion to have all available vram to work with you will want two cards (they don’t need to be the same card – one can be lesser – but i’ve heard that you’re best off with the same brand due to the drivers that need to be loaded).

   here are various gpu benchmarks using motion and another core image app:

   https://www.barefeats.com/nehal06.html

   Kevin Camp
   Senior Designer
   KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[David Bogie]

[Chris Davis] “I still want to use AE with Mac, and I want as much RT as possible. “

Rela time? Forget it.
That’s not a function available in After Effects.
Probably never will be.

bogiesan

[Chris Davis]

[bogiesan]
“..Forget it.
That’s not a function available in After Effects…”

I appreciate your help here.

[Kevin Camp]
“you will rarely ever get realtime in ae, it’s not designed to operate in realtime, it’s not even trying to be that type of application…

the genral order of importance for ae in rendering is…”

Thanks for the thorough response. That puts it in perspective and helps me understand where my money is best spent for AE.

“if you’re after realtime, go with motion and get a good graphics card…if you want two montiors, get two graphics cards. two montors plugged into the same card split the vram, so if you want motion to have all available vram to work with you will want two cards…”

Hugh. Good to know. I would have thought that the two monitors would just divide the vram and the GPU so that the power and memory went to the monitor that needed it most (the one with the canvas?). Are you implying that the power and memory gets split 50/50, or just that it’s shared between the two monitors?

When using Motion, If I use a single monitor plus a Matrox MXO plus external monitor (ACD) from the DVI out, would you recommend using two graphics cards?

When using Motion, if I use an MXO 2, or Blackmagic Designs Intensity Pro card to feed an HDTV, would this slow down RT? (Two very different price points, I know, but I’m still looking at my options).

Thanks for your help here,
-Chris

[Erik Mitchell]

Are you saying if I have 2 x 2.66 dual xeons, and 10GB of ram, then a geforce 7300gt I should just completely turn off OpenGL?

I have multiprocessing turned on with 2.09GB minimum per cpu. Is that the ideal setting?

thanks
erik