Mercury Rendering in AE 2018 for Mac

[mrtunes]

I am trying to use the VR Comp Editor in AE and I am getting the red bars, "This effect requires GPU Acceleration" message.

Heading over to preferences to switch the rendering I don't get any options to switch.

Macbook Air mid-2012. I know it's older but I have to at least give this a shot.

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

Although I haven't used this feature, most 2012 Macs, especially the notebooks, lack the graphics hardware for VR-type features.

The Help file for this feature (Construct VR environments in After Effects ) says:

Note:

When you work with VR, you could run into memory limitations indicated by a banner that states - Requires GPU Acceleration. By default, Adobe video applications require approximately 1GB of memory for every 1K of horizontal resolution when working in VR. In After Effects 2018, you can reduce the requirements, called Aggressive Memory Management. To enable the setting, select  Preferences > Previews > GPU Information > Aggressive GPU memory use (for VR).

I'll assume that they mean 1GB of VRAM, not RAM. A 2012 MacBook Air can allocate "Up to 1 GB DDR3 SDRAM shared from main memory." "Up to" meaning "if there's enough spare system RAM available" which might not be true if there is not a lot of RAM left over from the applications you're running. And even it could allocate 1GB VRAM, that's not all you need, you need "approximately 1GB of memory for every 1K of horizontal resolution when working in VR." Depending on the size of your composition, the 2012 MacBook Air may not be able to allocate enough VRAM to make this work with GPU acceleration.

I guess your best bet is to see if it helps to change that preference to reduce the requirements. If not, you might be out of luck. These features tend to be coded to use powerful, recent GPUs for acceleration, not integrated graphics from several years ago.

[BartonGarrett256]

A six year old laptop for VR work? Yikes. That’s living dangerously.

[mrtunes]

well i'm really just trying to work on 360 degree video. i believe i am able to still work on projects using Premiere, I just wouldn't be able to do much in the way of 3D without this acceleration if I understand correctly.

[David Arbor]

You need a minimum of 1 GB of VRAM for GPU-accelerated effects, without it, you can't enable the feature. Also, unlike the other effects in AE, the VR effects are GPU-accelerated ONLY; as of now, there is no CPU fallback.