“Optimizing Hardware Systems for Adobe® Premiere, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and PS"

The link was for an Adobe White Paper PDF regarding “Optimizing Hardware Systems for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS6, After Effects® CS6, SpeedGrade™ CS6, and Photoshop® Extended CS6”. (It now leads to the CC version.)

http://www.adobe.com …erformance-whitepaper.pdf

Please note that there may be additional video cards supported since the paper’s release.


For Adobe CC, see https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=16590312#po​st16590312

ALL Video cards that I have seen thus far with "Cuda" cores will work, but you have to hand-edit a configuration file (once) to tell Adobe's software to use them.

The difference is LARGE, incidentally.

tickerguy wrote in post #15721083
ALL Video cards that I have seen thus far with "Cuda" cores will work, but you have to hand-edit a configuration file (once) to tell Adobe's software to use them.

The difference is LARGE, incidentally.

Do you have additional information? Posting how to do so might be useful to some POTN members.

From the Adobe link in the first post of this thread: "A core performance feature in Adobe
Premiere Pro is the Mercury Playback
Engine (MPE), which optimizes video
processing calculations during previewing,
exporting, scrubbing, and other functions
in addition to playback. MPE employs
multithreading to take advantage of
multiple CPU cores (both real and virtual)
to accelerate these functions. The speed
of encoding and decoding the wide range
of media types Adobe Premiere Pro can
handle is also dependent on your CPU.
Additionally, if your computer has a
CUDA-enabled NVIDIA graphics card or
chip installed, it can also take advantage
of a qualified GPU to greatly accelerate a
number of functions—up to eight times
that of high end multicore CPUs, according to NVIDIA."

Making use of the GPU is extremely useful.

Also from the link: "Render Times for a Suite of Five Compositions with Ray-traced 3D Layers in After Effects CS6:
5:04:30 CPU-only (8-core 3.47 GHz Intel Xeon 5690 PC):
0:51:51 Quadro 2000
0:33:16 Quadro 4000
0:23:06 Quadro 5000
0:16:59 Quadro 6000
0:14:23 Maximus (Quadro 5000 + Tesla C2075)
0:10:56 Maximus (Quadro 6000 + Tesla C2075)
Note that After Effects can take advantage of multiple GPUs running the same version of CUDA
in the same system, as is the case with the Maximus configurations. (Check the NVIDIA website
************/AdobePWP-07 for the CUDA version supported by various cards: For example, a
Quadro FX 4800 supports CUDA 1.3, while a Quadro 4000 supports CUDA 2.0—so you cannot
combine these two different-generation cards and expect a performance gain over the fastest
single card.)"

and: "The Lumetri Deep Color Engine in SpeedGrade CS6 uses massive parallel processing in the GPU
running OpenGL for optimum graphics performance. This makes SpeedGrade unique among the
software discussed here in that virtually the entire program runs on the GPU in your computer,
rather than the CPU."

and: "Adobe Premiere Pro is as sensitive to the amount of GPU
memory available as normal CPU memory. Whether the CUDA hardware acceleration portion
of the Mercury Playback Engine can process a frame depends on the size of the frame compared to
the amount of GPU memory. To be processed with CUDA hardware acceleration, a frame requires
(width x height) ÷ 16,384 megabytes. If that value exceeds the available memory, Adobe Premiere
Pro will use the CPU for rendering of that current segment. This becomes a consideration for larger
digital cinema formats: For example, a 5120x2700 pixel “5k” frame from a RED camera requires
843MB of free GPU memory. This is on the edge of what can be supported by a card with 1GB of
total GPU memory (as some memory needs to be reserved for other display functions), but would
work comfortably on a card with 1.5 or 2GB of GPU memory. Bottom line: If you plan to be working
with large image sizes, get a GPU with more than 1GB of VRAM."

Time-lapse photography could also include some large frames.

Sure:

Go to your Premiere installation folder and execute the program "GPUSniffer.exe" (from the command line; use the "cmd" tool under Windows accessories)

It will display a bunch of information. The salient thing to check is that the card(s) you have claim to have Cuda support. If they don't then stop, it won't work. You're looking for the block of text at the end that starts with "CUDA Device x" (where "X" is the number of the display adapter(s) in your machine) This is found under the "GPU Computation Info" block.

The salient information is the "Name" of the device, which is the next line. Write it down EXACTLY (capitalization counts!)

Now look for the file "cuda_supported_cards.​txt" in the Premiere directory. Open it in Notepad. You will see a list of cards; those are the ones that Adobe recognizes. Add your card's information to the end of the file, EXACTLY as you copied it.

For example, my card shows as a "GeForce GTX 660", so I add to the end of the file:

GeForce GTX 660

Save the file and exit.

You should now be able to turn on the Mercury Engine CUDA acceleration in Premiere's preferences.

Yeah, it really is that easy.

It's unsupported of course so if there's a problem with using it (e.g. you get crashes or similar) you're on your own -- worst case you have to turn it back off in preferences. I've had zero trouble with it on however, and it makes an utterly enormous difference in performance.

Note that updates may overwrite the file; if you find that it has magically turned itself off after you load a software update just go back in there and turn it back on.

tickerguy wrote in post #15724179
Sure:

Go to your Premiere installation folder and execute the program "GPUSniffer.exe" (from the command line; use the "cmd" tool under Windows accessories)

It will display a bunch of information. The salient thing to check is that the card(s) you have claim to have Cuda support. If they don't then stop, it won't work. You're looking for the block of text at the end that starts with "CUDA Device x" (where "X" is the number of the display adapter(s) in your machine) This is found under the "GPU Computation Info" block.

The salient information is the "Name" of the device, which is the next line. Write it down EXACTLY (capitalization counts!)

Now look for the file "cuda_supported_cards.​txt" in the Premiere directory. Open it in Notepad. You will see a list of cards; those are the ones that Adobe recognizes. Add your card's information to the end of the file, EXACTLY as you copied it.

For example, my card shows as a "GeForce GTX 660", so I add to the end of the file:

GeForce GTX 660

Save the file and exit.

You should now be able to turn on the Mercury Engine CUDA acceleration in Premiere's preferences.

Yeah, it really is that easy.

It's unsupported of course so if there's a problem with using it (e.g. you get crashes or similar) you're on your own -- worst case you have to turn it back off in preferences. I've had zero trouble with it on however, and it makes an utterly enormous difference in performance.

Note that updates may overwrite the file; if you find that it has magically turned itself off after you load a software update just go back in there and turn it back on.

Thank you.

I have an older iMac, but Apple is driving me towards PCs. Final Cut Pro X, built-in batteries in laptops, old hardware, super thin instead of heavy duty laptops, super thin iMac edges that force the loss of an optical drive as well as card readers on the BACK of a monitor, and the lack of Blu-Ray support are just some of the reasons I am designing a PC. I will also mention my intense dislike of Windows, but Apple is trying, very hard, to drive me to Windows.

BTW for some plug-ins (like the Neat Video denoiser) having CUDA acceleration can improve rendering times by a factor of 10 or more.

For pedestrian rendering and processing (where there are no particularly-intensive effects in use) it makes a very noticeable but not ridiculous difference in performance. Where you'll see it instantly is in the preview window where you can scrub a timeline and have effectively real-time display performance -- without CUDA GPU assistance that's just not happening.

But if you use any of the more-intense effects in your work then render times will become ridiculous without GPU acceleration yet remain tolerable with it.

tickerguy wrote in post #15724531
BTW for some plug-ins (like the Neat Video denoiser) having CUDA acceleration can improve rendering times by a factor of 10 or more.

For pedestrian rendering and processing (where there are no particularly-intensive effects in use) it makes a very noticeable but not ridiculous difference in performance. Where you'll see it instantly is in the preview window where you can scrub a timeline and have effectively real-time display performance -- without CUDA GPU assistance that's just not happening.

But if you use any of the more-intense effects in your work then render times will become ridiculous without GPU acceleration yet remain tolerable with it.

I will be making strong use of Premiere, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and Photoshop, so I am designing a computer that will maximize the performance, within my budget, for those programs.