External graphic card for Imac?

A few months after my first post about the subject...

I have two machines, one Imac 2,8 GHz Core i7 and one Mac book pro three months years old (I bought it just before the new version ... Grrrrrr).

I tried AE CS6 on a trial version. It rocks but ...

I made a comp of 20 seconds and animated three letters reflecting each other and reflecting two other images. While I was working with draft mode, or low res it was ok. I rendered it in half resolution and it took 7 hours. I then tried to render it full res ... woooooow! Ladies and gentlemen ... 56 hours to render! I was obliged to stop it of course

However, my question here is: Is there any external graphics card that I could put on the thunderbolt so I could speed up the 3D raytrace? Otherwise I'm good to buy a new machine, wich I don't want to do right now!

Thanx

Marc

I don't believe Mac OS X currently supports external GPUs via Thunderbolt [link].

The enclosure in Juan and Danny's tests is a PCIe extender working on a Mac Pro (and it costs about as much as a Mac Pro anyway).

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

[Marc De Coster] "Impossible to work with CS6 on my laptop or my IMac"

The only feature that won't work is GPU acceleration for the new ray-tracing renderer. Everything else will work fine, and even ray-tracing will work (very slowly) CPU-only.

There are a handful of third-party 3D effects for After Effects you might consider, including Mettle FreeForm Pro and ShapeShifter AE, Video Copilot Element 3D, and Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro. The latest version of Invigorator also features a ray-tracer (though I haven't dug into it yet to see how it compares).


[Marc De Coster] "I bought an IMac last yeau because, for almost have the price, I have a machine that is running faster that a Mac Pro (I heard that FCP and AE didn't use all the processors)"

Unfortunately, it sounds like you were misinformed. AE will use just about as much hardware as you throw at it -- and the 2010 Mac Pros clobber the 2011 iMacs for After Effects [link]. (Of course, a 2012 PC clobbers even the 2012 Mac Pro.)


[Marc De Coster] "Anyway ... I think I'll wait and see ... or learn some of C4D !"

Learning C4D is a great way to expand your motion graphics capabilities. Some good reading in this recent thread: Which 3D FX/Tools? [link]

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