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R
rcrodgers
Participant
April 25, 2012
Answered

CS6 and AMD Radeons on PC, not Macs

  • April 25, 2012
  • 2 replies
  • 27386 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

    S
    spoofy1
    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.

    R
    RjL190365
    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.

    Todd_Kopriva
    Todd_Kopriva
    Inspiring
    April 25, 2012

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

    Thanks for the clarification. Jim. Unfortunately, there will be no such OpenCL hack for the Windows version of Premiere Pro CS6 because such support will not be initially included with this edition. However, OpenCL support in the Windows edition of Premiere Pro CS6 may be added in a future update.

    And what Todd stated about OpenCL support in the OSX edition of Premiere reflects the fact that hacks to enable GPU acceleration support are (or will not be) officially supported by Adobe itself. This means that if any problems arise from such a hack, technical support may be denied until the hack is completely reversed.


    I'll leave it to our engineering leads/managers (Steve and Dave) to talk about specifics, but there is actually a lot more engineering and testing work that would need to be done to use OpenCL on Windows.

    When Premiere Pro CS5 came out, Premiere Pro could use about half a dozen cards for GPU acceleration. With each update, we added more, so that it's now more than two dozen, including two using OpenCL. From this, it should be very clear that we are taking a conservative but brisk approach to these GPUs: We will only support what we have been able to implement and test fully, and we'll add more as we get specific requests and have the time/resources to do so.

    When second-guessing our decisions, be sure to factor in thorough testing of each configuration in addition to the software engineering time. Testing is very often the more resource-consuming part.

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