I have recently been learning about Adobe’s poor support of GPU, especially on MacBooks using external GPUs. This whole situation is ridiculous and adobe needs to answer explicitly what they’re going to do.
I have a MackBook Pro (2018 i9, 32M, 1TB SSD) and a BlackMagic eGPU (560 Radeon), connected through TB3, and I can't tell you: After Effects ignores all of it. The AE is eGPU enabled, the RAM shared is 27GB and the sracth disk (SSD) has 600GB. However, the app doesn't matter about all of this, specially when there are audiotracks or short footage clips along the timeline. Preview sucks and it takes too longo to work on a couple of frames.
It is very disappointing. What is it happening here?
If you add just one effect that uses cpu in your composition the whole project will be rendered on the cpu. The gpu support (like the one in media encoder and premiere) is usefull only if you avoid any effects/plugins(and whatnot) that use cpu.
So for example if you render a video in 4k with nothing on it but a lumetri you will have like 1 sec of render /minute of footage and will use the gpu. But if you add something like a threshold you will get 10minutes of render/minute of footage and will use the cpu.
Also there is not much documentation on what uses what(what effects go on cpu what goes on gpu) that would help quite alot...
I was considering upgrading my rig to a 4090, bcause I've heard its a monster card. Once I started looking into it I realized there was no point.
Adobe this is how you use a GPU:
Meanwhile AE, every GPU within the margin of error:
Premiere also content to just leave the 1600$ basically GPU idle:
Not an Apple to Apples comparison, I get it, but to illustrate how much more powerful this GPU is and now much Adobe is leaving on the table, and how of our much time they are wasting by not rendering things as fast as they could:
Adobe its 2023. "Mercury Playback" is 13 years old. It's almost old enough to drive. Based on how often things crash maybe don't let it drive. Time to give us Mercury 2.0. I think you've milked the Iradias purchase enough. Maybe buy Blackmagic and steal their code? Seems like the only way to get new features from Adobe half the time is if they decide to purchase another company.
I swear shape layer performance has gotten even worse lately. I can barely render 3 rounded rectangles with three text layers without it dipping below realtime.