I have a shiny new 2x2.8 Quad Core Xeon Mac that has 6gb of RAM. When AE CS3 boots up, the splash page says using x% of 3gb, not 6gb. Does this mean AE is not seeing all my RAM, or is only capable of utilizing 3gb? Or am I completely misunderstanding this whole thing?
Thanks!
Motion Graphics Designer / Art Director
Boston, MA
Re: RAM question by Kevin Camp on Mar 13, 2008 at 2:26:48 pm
ae is a 32-bit application so it can only use 3gb of ram... with cs3, or nucleo, ae can use 2gb-3gb of ram for each processing core by using multiple instances of the render engine.
so if you have 4 cores, ae (or nucleo) can use 4 render engines with each using up to 2gb-3gb of ram for a total of 8gb-12gb of ram usage (i say 2gb-3gb per core because i keep hearing conflicting data about actual ram usage, in theory it should be 3gb).
if you have cs3, you need to enable multiprocessing in the preferences, and you may need to tweak the max ram cache setting a little to get all 4 cores to render... maybe setting the max cache to 50%. the multiprocessing pref will tell you how many 'additional cores' will be used, so you can change the max ram cache until you get the number of cores you wan't.
Re: RAM question by Darby Edelen on Mar 13, 2008 at 3:33:52 pm
[Mike MacKenzie]"Forgive my ignorance but does processor = core?"
Basically dual core processors are a CPU chip with two processing units or cores on it (two processors for the price of one... only more expensive), quad core would have 4 processing units on a chip.
To add to what was said before, I would not recommend making AE use all the cores/processors available to your system for render. This tends to slow any other processes down significantly. I have a Quad Core (2x dual core) Mac Pro and I set AE to use 3 cores for rendering. This gives me a significant boost in render speed while not slowing other applications to a crawl.
Darby Edelen Designer Left Coast Digital Santa Cruz, CA
Re: RAM question by Andrew Zofka on Mar 13, 2008 at 7:12:04 pm
[Kevin Camp]"so if you have 4 cores, ae (or nucleo) can use 4 render engines with each using up to 2gb-3gb of ram for a total of 8gb-12gb of ram usage (i say 2gb-3gb per core because i keep hearing conflicting data about actual ram usage, in theory it should be 3gb). "
But this is dual quad-core, so it has 8 cores. So, to use all of them 16-24GB RAM is required?
If I have only 6GB does it mean I should use only 3 cores (currently AE is set to use 6).
Re: RAM question by Kevin Camp on Mar 13, 2008 at 9:04:40 pm
i believe adobe recommends 1gb per processing core so you could get 6 cores rendering, by adobe's recommendation. i can't remember what the minimum amount of ram per core is, check the ae help file under multiprocessing, i think that is where i saw the info.
i currently have only 4gb ram on a 4-core macpro and 1gb per core works pretty well. as far as running other apps, i rarely do while i'm running ae and i rarely have problems.
from everything that i've heard nucleo pro is more stable and can use less ram per core, it also has cool extras like background rendering if you can get that (it's cheaper than ram). i think there is still an issue with nucleo pro and osx 10.5 though....
Re: RAM question by Dave LaRonde on Mar 13, 2008 at 4:28:59 pm
Here's something else to consider as you set up your multiprocessing: be sure to leave 1-2GB RAM free so you can run the operating system, and perhaps another application.
Jeez, who would have though that you could thorough 6GZ so fast? But you know, you CAN put 16GB RAM on your machine.......
Re: RAM question by Mike MacKenzie on Mar 14, 2008 at 7:07:38 pm
Well, I just got off the phone with Adobe tech support who have informed me that the only time AE is capable of using more than 3gb RAM is for the actual rendering to files.
There is one option in the Multiprocessor Support preference panel, check this and that's it.
Thanks t everyone for all the help!
Motion Graphics Designer / Art Director
Boston, MA
