I've been to the mountain: Adobe. Answers. One question.
by Laurie Pepper
on
Jul 17, 2008 at 9:15:27 pm
Had quite a chat with a super duper techie at Adobe because I've been getting so many different answers to my questions about CS3 and graphics cards and open GL and multiprocessors.
He said:
CS3 DOES NOW use open gl previewing with 10.5.5. (I'll try it tonight)
He says nvidia is a better graphics card for large texture-heavy still files. He says ATI doesn't do so well with those. Something about the texture buffer.
He says that CS3 is buggy with an 8 core machine, because it can only use 4 processors & gets into logjams, SO... He says, either don't buy the 8 core machine that's in the mail to me right now, or use Apple's CHUD to disable 4 processors.
I asked him: Can Nucleo Pro handle the 8 processors?
He said He didn't know.
Anybody???????????????
Re: I've been to the mountain: Adobe. curiouser and curiouser by Laurie Pepper on Jul 17, 2008 at 10:48:53 pm
And what about this from barefeats?
certainly a great argument for lotsa memory.
Though Apple has created Final Cut Pro and Motion to compete with Adobe Premiere and After Effects, it's ironic that the programmers at Adobe "show the way" when it comes to squeezing maximum speed from the 8-core Mac Pro.
As you know, we've been fishing for an application that, by itself, can justify the purchase of an 8-core Mac Pro. I think we have found it: Adobe After Effects CS3. Though we added our After Effects results to previous articles on the 8-core Mac Pro, we decided to devote a special page to showing the dramatic the performance gains achieved not only by moving to the 8-core Mac Pro but upgrading from After Effects 7 to After Effects 8 (aka CS3).
The big news with After Effects CS3 is that it's not only written in Universal code (native for both PPC and Intel Macs), but it has a special feature called "Multiprocessing" which is enabled in Preferences. There is a check box that enables "render multiple frames simultaneously." When checked, AE spawns a process for each core called "aeselflink" and grabs up to 3GB of real memory per process. It's like creating a "render farm" within a single Mac.
We used the TotalBenchmark project by Brian Maffitt to "exericise" After Effects CS3 on four of the top performing Macs. Not only were all 8 cores "cooking" in the top Mac Pro, but 1.5GB of real memory was dedicated to each process -- or a total of over 15GB in use out of 16GB available!
Re: I've been to the mountain: Adobe. Answers. One question. by Steve Forde on Jul 18, 2008 at 1:06:22 am
Ummm - I have to admit, i have no clue what you are talking about here. First - lets look at some facts...
[Laurie Pepper]"CS3 DOES NOW use open gl previewing with 10.5.5."
10.5.5 does not exist - YET. There is no way for you or anyone else to try this as Apple has not released it yet. Unfortunately - I believe your "super duper techie" is feeding you "super duper FALSE" information.
[Laurie Pepper]"or use Apple's CHUD to disable 4 processors."
CHUD (Computer Hardware Understanding Development) ) is a developer toolkit for performance optimization in Mac OS X. Here is Apple's description....
"The Computer Hardware Understanding Developer Tools (CHUD Tools) are designed to help hardware and software developers measure and optimize the performance of Macintosh systems."
So unless you have the source code for After Effects (which I HIGHLY doubt you do) - CHUD will do absolutely nothing for you in terms of CS3 optimization.
[Laurie Pepper]"He says that CS3 is buggy with an 8 core machine, because it can only use 4 processors & gets into logjams, "
CS3 has a feature called Multiprocessing that is very similar to our Nucleo (Not Nucleo Pro) product in terms of processor optimization. That statement from your super duper techie is completely false.
[Laurie Pepper]"I asked him: Can Nucleo Pro handle the 8 processors?"
Since I helped invent Nucleo Pro - I can say with a high degree of confidence that NP2 can use all 8 processors quite nicely. (just make sure you have 2GB of RAM per processor)
I've been to the mountain and found... Two Steves! by Laurie Pepper on Jul 18, 2008 at 6:43:10 am
Okay.
First Thanks for putting me in my place. I was getting a little uppity. Good to know about Nucleo Pro.
Now. I've been on this board and on Adobe's board trying to find out which video card to use. (I'm spending a lot of money on the mac pro, and I want to spend wisely.)
I got a lot of confusing info. The guys below said open gl in AE on mac is a dream, and forget about it.* But Adobe's website says that open gl is now available for mac, using certain graphics cards.
This was very confusing.
So I finally thought I was talking to the horse's mouth when I reached this techie at Adobe who talks all day to mac users who have problems with ae.
I quoted what he said, here, and you guys talk down to me and fist bump each other, when all I've been doing is asking for help and then ignorantly quoting an Adobe rep.
I thought he must know.
What a dummy I was.
He would at least talk to me -- because by the way, when I tried to contact Gridiron Software nobody responded to me, neither by phone nor email.
Anyway, Here's what I got on this board: *And I quote:
Re: 2 ati radeon or 1 nvidia geforce on Mac Pro?
by david bogie on Jul 15, 2008 at 7:48:49 am
Rumors abound that the next revs of Adobe products and Apple suites for the Intel Macs will be OS10.5-only and will finally take advantage of Leopard's abilities to shift the Core Media handlers directly to the GPU.
Rumors only but Motion is the only product in the FC Studio to use the GPU muscle. FCP has to get around to it eventually.
OpenGL for AE has always been a dream. Maybe CS4 will make it real.
AND
Re: 2 ati radeon or 1 nvidia geforce on Mac Pro?
by Dave LaRonde on Jul 14, 2008 at 2:04:55 pm
[Laurie Pepper] "Which is the best video card for 3d renders in AE on the new mac pro 8 core I'm about to buy."
Good news! Any of the above. Take your pick.
AE doesn't rely on hot video cards nearly as much as other apps. In fact, AE positively stinks when it tries to use Open GL. Everyone I know just forgets about Open GL in AE. In AE, a lot of memory is far, far more important.
I don't know how knowledgeable these guys are compared to you two Steves but they're kind. They've been kind to me. In my book that beats inventing Nucleo Pro. Or Nucleo. Whatever.
Re: I've been to the mountain and found... Two Steves! by Itamar Kool on Jul 18, 2008 at 10:00:10 am
I have an 8 core Mac with 9 gigs of RAM. Set my AE preferences to using 4 cores. I also have Nucleo Pro 2 but I turned it off. I use Multiprocessing from the preferance. I am still not impressed by the performance of the 8 core. May be that I still haven't got the right settings
Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/OS 10.4.11/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
www.koolendeanderen.nl
Re: I've been to the mountain and found... Two Steves! by Eric Berna on Jul 18, 2008 at 12:42:27 pm
Kool,
The Mac Pro accepts RAM modules in sets of two or four matched modules. When the Mac Pro has only sets of 4 matched modules, the memory controller can access all four modules as a single 256-bit memory bank, improving RAM access performance by as much as 10%.
I can't think of a configuration of RAM for the Mac Pro that results in 9GB with only matched sets of 4 modules, so I'm guessing your Mac Pro isn't using 256-bit memory access mode. You may notice better performance if you change your memory configuration.
If part of that 9GB of RAM is in the form of four matched modules, you can experiment with better performance without spending extra money. Install those four matched modules across both RAM riser cards (two RAM modules per riser card, in the same slots on each riser), and test your Mac's performance.
P.S. I benchmarked my own computer with 8 GB total (4 x 2GB) and 10 GB total (4 x 2GB and 2 x 1 GB), and measured a noticeable performance improvement when in 256-bit memory access mode.
Re: I've been to the mountain and found... Two Steves! by Itamar Kool on Jul 18, 2008 at 1:06:44 pm
Hi Eric, Thanks for your remarks. The 9 gig resulted from buying 8 gig extra on a machine that had standard 1 gig of RAM. I know for sure that the 8 gigs were divided in 4 modules. The 1 gig was divided in 2 (512MB each). I don't know nothing about this 256-bit memory access mode. How do I get there??
Thanks in advance
Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/OS 10.4.11/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
www.koolendeanderen.nl
Re: I've been to the mountain and found... Two Steves! by Steve Forde on Jul 18, 2008 at 12:49:02 pm
[Laurie Pepper]"He would at least talk to me -- because by the way, when I tried to contact Gridiron Software nobody responded to me, neither by phone nor email. "
Laurie - you sent an email to GridIron Software at 4:42pm EST yesterday. I responded to you on this forum at 9:06pm EST. What further response are you looking for?
What you choose to believe based on information from whichever source is entirely up to you.
The reason that I came down hard on some of your information is you propagated information as FACT from an authorized source (Adobe employee) when unfortunately it was entirely FICTION. In fact - I will go so far as to say that if the person feeding you that information is indeed an Adobe employee (as you imply), I would love to be a fly on the wall at their next performance review!
In short - your new mac pro will absolutely rock with AE, as long as you put the RAM in. OpenGL is not a big deal for AE - but may be handy for things like 3D etc. From an AE perspective video card is secondary to CPU, RAM and Disk.
Whether you choose to use NP2 is entirely up to you - (although I obviously recommend it - I work at GridIron). Your question to GridIron and on this forum was will Nucleo Pro use all 8 cores. Again - I answer - YES.
"OpenGL for AE has always been a dream" by Thomas Leong on Jul 18, 2008 at 1:06:31 pm
Taken in context, the writer meant 'it exists only in one's mind'. Note the following sentence referring to "Maybe CS4 will make it real." That should be a strong hint that Open GL generally does not work well in AE CS3 and earlier versions.
Having said that, Nvidia gfx cards are generally better at OpenGL than ATI cards.
Personally I use ATI cards as I find them subtly more pleasing to the eye for video display purposes, not for their OpenGL capabilites.
Thomas Leong
http;//www.multidisplays.freeforums.org
Re: I've been to the mountain: Adobe. Answers. One question. by Chris Poisson on Jul 18, 2008 at 3:34:13 pm
Hi Steve,
I never knew about the multiprocessor thing in CS3, will that help or compete with Nucleo Pro? I rendered a file this morning with Nucleo Pro 2 which took about 25 minutes, and while it was rendering I read this thread. When it was done, I enabled multiprocessing and rendered the same file again without Nucleo, it looked like it was going to take less than half the time, but it locked up half way through. So what's happening here?
Re: I've been to the mountain: Adobe. Answers. One question. by Itamar Kool on Jul 18, 2008 at 3:39:40 pm
One thing is for sure: you can't do both at the same time. You have to disable Nucleo Pro 2 when you use Adobe multiprocessing and the toher way round. I disabled NP myself. Just didn't feel stable enough
Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/OS 10.4.11/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
www.koolendeanderen.nl
Re: I've been to the mountain: Adobe. Answers. One question. by Steve Forde on Jul 18, 2008 at 3:48:06 pm
Multiprocessing in CS3 is identical in nature to Nucleo standard. In other words - the features of fast-render and fast-preview found in both Nucleo Pro and Nucleo are what you get in CS3. They behave almost identically - and for the most part achieve the same result.
Nucleo Pro does things like Background Render, Spec Preview / Render, Commit to Disk, Pre-comp proxies etc., which neither Nucleo standard nor Multiprocessing provide. Since Nucleo Pro maxes out CPU in all features - CS3 multiprocessing must be disabled when using NP2.
As for what could be locking up Multiprocessing and not locking up NP2 - unfortunately is difficult to track as they both use different architecture yet similar approach. Some users have reported that NP2 is slightly faster than Multiprocessing but both are designed to achieve max performance.
