[Trezy Peebles]

[Walter Soyka] “Upgrading your GPU won’t help you at all with this. Normal 2D and Classic 3D rendering in After Effects is done exclusively on the CPU.”

Thanks a lot Walter, that definitely helped me out. I find it strange that AE uses the CPU exclusively but I suppose it makes sense since the CPU is almost always more capable than the GPU.

[Walter Soyka] “Some third-party effects like Sapphire or Neat Video may use CUDA for processing, and some like Optical Flares, Element 3D, ShapeShifter Ae, Magic Bullet Looks, etc. process on the GPU via OpenGL. The Ae interface itself is also accelerated by OpenGL.

Particular is not GPU-accelerated.”

I guess I chose the only plugin I use that doesn’t utilize the GPU as an example, go figure. Most of what I do utilizes either Trapcode Form of Particular, though I also use MagicBullet for coloring and I’m just getting into using Element 3D so the GPU will still be vital for me.

[Walter Soyka] “Ae’s ray-tracing renderer doesn’t use SLI.

It will, however, use all available CUDA GPUs on your system.”

So what’s the technical difference here? I thought SLI was just a technology allowing your machine to utilize all cards connected through SLI, so how is it not doing that by using all available GPUs and VRAM?

[Walter Soyka] “If you’re considering Premiere Pro as your editor, I’d go with the 570 hands down — Premiere only supports multiple CUDA GPUs in a Maximus (Quadro/Tesla) configuration. It will not support multiple GeForces.”

Premiere Pro has been my editor for years so I don’t think I’ll be changing anytime soon. However, I use Premiere Pro only for editing in my workflow. No effects, no transitions, no stabilization (though the addition of stabilization to CS6 is tempting). Hence, I’m not particularly concerned about it’s performance on this new rig. It’s still something I’ll keep in mind.