AMD Dual D700 usage in After effects and premiere benchmarks

Question

I've scoured the web, and I keep hearing mixed things from people, some claiming that support for dual gpu's has been in use for a while by adobe, others claiming they were talking to adobe support and a known issue with the AMD cards was being worked on. When it comes to raytrace 3d rendering VS cinema4D in after effects, everyone seems to dismiss the issue as moot because cinema4d seems to get around the gpu bottleneck.

Yet after downloading XRG, a free bench mark program for OS X, and testing out my top of the line Mac Pro with dual AMD d700 cards, it only ever shows one card being used, and an OCCASIONAL spike on the second one. As far as I can tell, the second graphics card is not being used 99% of the time, even when I'm rendering 3d objects, or throwing a bunch of video effects or plug ins, color correction, pretty much anything I can think of.

Is there something I'm missing here? Is there a better benchmarking software so I can see for myself which GPU is handling the load during real world usage of my workflow?

Why should I even invest in adobe when I hear Final Cut Pro X can utilize both of my video cards better?

Why is this still occurring when this machine is supposedly a 2013 model?

When will support for both of my graphics cards come into effect? Is this currently being worked on at all? Seems like such a waste.

David Arbor · Answer

You mentioned a lot of different things, so I'll try to tackle them individually:

1) After Effects currently only supports a single GPU

2) The RayTraced 3D Renderer is obsolete and it's probably not a good idea to use anymore. That ONLY used CUDA, so your AMD cards won't do you any good here

3) The new Cinema 4D is CPU-based, so again, your GPUs won't help. It is multi-threaded, though, so it can take advantage of all your cores, thus allowing it to be somewhat speedy.

4) Premiere uses dual GPUs for rendering and export, but not playback.

5) After Effects is increasing the number of effects that are GPU-accelerated with every release. Each effect has to be re-written from the ground up to support GPU-acceleration.

6) Why should you invest? That's entirely your choice. FCP X was built from scratch and is modern and very fast. After Effects just had its 25th birthday and is having its core being re-written from the inside out. If you work alone and or with others who use FCP X, maybe it's the better option for you. After Effects, however, is a totally different beast than Motion, and while Motion is very nice and has some amazing features, After Effects continues to dominate the market because of it's power, flexibility, and extensibility.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded