[Rex Polanis] "I still would like my software to use my graphics card; even if it doesn't contain a complete OptiX ray-tracing library. "
I hear you. You have a nice and expensive professional-grade GPU, and you want to put it to use.
It should perform well in some other DCC applications. The sorts of things that workstation-caliber GPUs like the FirePro are good at are generally things like live OpenGL rendering and high-quality, high-speed anti-aliasing that improve viewport performance with complicated models in 3D/CAD applications.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but After Effects has never used a GPU well in its 19-year history. The things that graphics cards are traditionally good at are not really applicable to the things that AE needs to do.
The now-defunct OpenGL renderer was a disaster that caused more problems than it solved. CS6 is the first version of AE that can reliably render anything on any GPU at all. Again, it's important to understand that AE is not using the graphics card for in a traditional sense -- it's using the graphics card for numerical calculations, not pixel-based calculations.
[Rex Polanis] "Adobe did push and market this particular feature but didn't make it common knowledge that it requires a Nvidia CUDA card to fully exploit it."
I do think that the ray-tracer has been way over-hyped, largely by the community, but in fairness, the
system requirements [link] are very clear about which graphics cards are supported for GPU acceleration.
I actually like the idea that that you can buy specific hardware for the best performance -- it makes it easier to purpose-build a system. For now, an NVIDIA GPU is like an ICE board for a new generation of AE users.
Is there another app you're using that really benefits from the FirePro over an NVIDIA GeForce or Quadro?
[Rex Polanis] "The AMD Firepro V7900 was made to handle stuff like this and the fact that Adobe only wants it's software to use Nvidia CUDA screams of special interest to me."
I certainly don't speak for Adobe, but I don't think it's fair to suggest special interest or collusion with NVIDIA here. Let's look at the industry in general for a moment, and then at Adobe specifically.
NVIDIA did some really highly innovative work on GPGPU (general purpose computation on graphics processor units) with their CUDA technology that ATI, AMD, and Intel were not able to match at the time. As a result, NVIDIA built a commanding (and well-deserved) early lead in GPU co-processing, which they compounded by developing libraries like OptiX that make it easier for developers to build applications targeting CUDA. For a while, CUDA was the only serious option for GPU co-processing, and other notable apps like Resolve actually required a CUDA card to work at all.
OpenCL is a heterogenous parallel computing library which, among other things, allows for GPGPU similarly to CUDA (NVIDIA is a major contributor to OpenCL). The downsides? OpenCL is newer than CUDA and its development tools are less mature. The upside? As you note, OpenCL is an open standard which will run on any hardware, not just NVIDIA's proprietary cards.
I don't think Adobe is interested in picking hardware -- I think they're interested in getting features out to their users.
Starting with CS6, Adobe introduced OpenCL support in Photoshop (which never supported CUDA acceleration anyway) and added OpenCL acceleration alongside the existing CUDA acceleration in the Premiere Pro's Mercury Playback Engine.
Without a library like OptiX as a starting point for the developers, I doubt that AE would have had ray-tracing in CS6 at all.
This is all pretty complex stuff in an emerging field, and it'll take some time to shake out.
In the mean time, if you want to see OpenCL support in AE's ray-tracing renderer, please consider submitting a
feature request [link]. The developers actually read them all, and the more people who request a feature, the more attention it usually gets.
Walter Soyka
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