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Participant
April 25, 2012
Answered

CS6 and AMD Radeons on PC, not Macs

  • April 25, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 27380 views

I haven't seen a direct answer to this, though I saw an Adobe employee (Todd) comment "for now" with a link to http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2012/04/premiere-pro-cs6-whats-new-and-changed.html , but I want to clarify this as much as possible now.

Last year, I built a new fairly high-end PC system for editing with CS5.5, but I stopped short of buying a video card at the time because I knew AMD was releasing the Radeon HD7000 series in the not too distant future, and that NVidia would be releasing the GTX 600 series in a similar timeframe. (Both series, obviously, have been at least partially released now.) I've been making do quite well with an ancient video card (Radeon HD4870) in the mean time. For personal and historical reasons, I prefer the AMD cards over NVidia, but I've been on the edge of pulling the trigger and ordering a GTX 680 over the last few weeks because I knew it was likely to be supported in the Mercury Playback Engine. However, now that CS6 has been announced and it uses OpenCL, that opens the door for me to stick with the AMD cards, and I just want to clarify that I will get the GPU acceleration on a Radeon series video card on my PC should I upgrade to some 7000 series card and upgrade to CS6. As someone mentioned in the thread I read earlier asked about this but was again more or less just pointed at a reference to Macs with AMD video chipsets, not PCs with discrete AMD cards.

I personally can't afford to upgrade my video card and to CS6 just to find that I don't get the GPU acceleration I was expecting.

Thank you!

Raymond Rodgers

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Todd_Kopriva

    You will not be able to use OpenCL for GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro CS6 on Windows.

    2 replies

    Participant
    April 21, 2013

    So I don't know if any of you have seen this, but AMD posted an article on their website about them working wtih Adobe to create OpenCL support for Windows.  http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-and-adobe-2013apr5.aspx

    Todd_Kopriva
    Todd_KoprivaCorrect answer
    Inspiring
    April 25, 2012

    You will not be able to use OpenCL for GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro CS6 on Windows.

    Legend
    April 25, 2012

    True (at least on the initial release of CS6). But also starting with CS6, I am expecting that NVIDIA CUDA GPUs that are not officially supported for GPU acceleration to be semi-permanently locked into the software-only mode (at least until a future update is released): The .txt file may be eliminated altogether and the CUDA GPU support may be hard-coded into the program's executable itself. However, the list of officially supported NVIDIA CUDA cards remains unchanged in CS6 from CS5.5. This means that the new GTX 680 will not be officially supported on release of CS6 since that GPU was introduced after the development of CS6 was largely completed.

    And Adobe made a wise move in limiting initial OpenCL GPU acceleration support to those MacBook Pros running OSX Lion equipped with the HD 6750M and HD 6770M chips with 1GB or more VRAM: That particular move was made largely because Apple no longer sells any of its systems with NVIDIA GPUs. The HD 6750M and HD 6770M GPUs in iMacs will also not be supported because those systems with said GPUs have only 512MB of VRAM - too little VRAM to even enable GPU acceleration at all.

    Legend
    April 25, 2012

    I am expecting that...the .txt file may be eliminated altogether

    Why?  Wil Rencez has already suggested it may well be possible for Mac users to 'hack' additional Radeons.