New mac pro and open cl support

[SpencerCarpenter]

Hi,

I was wondering what the low down is on the benefits of using the new mac pro with it's ati cards with open cl?

I've looked around and can't see any recent articles about it, I'm assumng that Adobe will capitilse on open cl but not sure of any details...

Thanks for any info on this.

Spencer

[doctorsney]

Not to go off topic too much here, but I'd rather cut my throat (or in this case pay thousands of extra dollars) NOT to ever touch a windows machine ever again. I'm using a Mac, I like macs. I used to build my own PC workstations so I know my s***. But now I like macs. If hackintoshes were reliable I would go that route, but I'm just not interested in responses that tell me to change hardware, I like my hardware choice, I like my platform choice.

Also the nature of most of my projects make this the optimum time to buy for me, so I bought a 12 core mac. It's not that I'm unaware of the new Xeon chips being released, but unless there was a machine featuring this at time I needed to purchase, it's a moot discussion for me at least.

I have my hardware, it's kick ass hardware. I want it to perform. I dislike the idea that Nvidia seem to be favored in terms of what you can create. Someone somewhere is dropping the ball and I don't care who fixes it, I just want it fixed. So Adobe, ATI, Apple, Allah and Buddha, please make the ray-traced 3d stuff fly on my new mac pro, and in all future cases, please don't release features that favor one specific hardware vendor. As someone who works in multiple studios and frequently takes projects with him, some level of uniformity would be great. It's better than it used to be in terms of cross platform uniformity, but we're not there yet. There's a world class graphics card (x2) in the mac pro, why isn't anyone making this thing do what the Nvidia cards can do.

Thanks.

[ECBowen]

Well as someone who has been in the tech industry a long time and watched the evolution of GPU acceleration, I can tell you it's not that simple. Open CL has not been and still isn't nearly as mature as Cuda is currently. The development tools and resources available behind Cuda have been far more mature for years. Open CL is still catching up with that. Cuda has been used as the initial GPU acceleration MPI since the beginning with most applications that started with it for a reason. The fact Adobe started with Cuda support and has been building with Cuda is well published online. There are endless amounts of posts that say Cuda still far out performs Open CL. If with all that information the person still decides on the Open CL only hardware and solution then that person chose the less performance for their own reasons. It's not up to Adobe to change this in the near future to justify that persons choice in hardware. You don't buy a laptop to be your web server. You buy a server for that. BTW which is easier to fix this or to have made this a non issue. Apple to ship Nvidia cards with their nMPro or Adobe to redo their entire code and software?

Eric

ADK

[doctorsney]

Thanks for the response Erik. It hardly makes my day, but I appreciate you pitching in.

[NordicFilmworks]

Wow... Almost a year later and Adobe still has no solution for Mac users other than incredibly slow, buggy, and relatively unsupported GPUs.  Maybe by 2017 Adobe will support a massive amount of their paying customers on mac...

[ECBowen]

Unfortunately there are not nearly as many Mac users versus PC/Windows users so the market share puts the Mac users at a disadvantage for R&D dollars. Along with this Apple's philosophy has changed from High performance pro work to good enough generalist use. People staying Mac now are simply doing so for the OS. The performance and applications available no longer carry the platform.

Eric

ADK

[NordicFilmworks]

Sorry, nope.  Realtime rendering basically with Nuke all day today.  This is an Adobe issue not supporting advanced hardware.

[ECBowen]

1 application does not a platform make. I would also look at Fusion at this point versus Nuke especially since BM has it now. Nuke is going to have some trouble competing with it's price point comparatively.

As to functionality yes I am ware there are applications that play fine with OSX and the Open CL. However there are far more having issues and I would say Nuke's acceleration is not anywhere near those at this point. Even Davinci is having issues with Open CL right now on OSX.

I am aware Adobe treats them the same since it's relatively split even. However the hardware and software manufacturers as a whole don't see it that way because globally Mac is less than 10% of the market. As more applications move to hardware acceleration and are reliant on OS and hardware/driver changes this is going to show more. Apple takes on the update responsibility themselves to alleviate as much of that as possible but the cost is the ability to respond to problems as they occur quickly. The 3rd party companies often have to wait on them for those and that drags the resolutions out even longer. Microsoft's model that allows the partners to respond themselves with fixes over more components fits today's media content industry pace better as it is right now.

Eric

ADK

[NordicFilmworks]

ECBowen,

Then Adobe should simply remove the little "we support Mac OS X" operating system off their products.  By stating you support the operating system, you make certain promises to the customer; one would be reasonable updates of the software to hardware;  it has been more than a year that these issues starting occurring for Mac users with Adobe AEFX.

[ECBowen]

Well if your talking AE that doesn't have any acceleration to speak of outside of Ray Tracer which is going away. Dont expect that to change any time soon even on Windows. Remember GPU acceleration is still very young tech. Development is really less than 6 to 8 years old for the most part. Application designers have not even scratched the surface of what can be evolved over to it. AE works on OSX as does Premiere. The difference is the GPU acceleration with Open CL on Premiere is new compared to Cuda which is several years evolved and far more developed by Nvidia than Open CL was and is right now in general. Companies have far more to do to implement Open CL with far less tools and preexisting development to pull from. This translates into more issues especially as the hardware evolves with more threading and memory management constantly fluctuating with ever more amounts of ram available along with OS development for API's and their support. What your stating is you want Open CL to have the same performance as Cuda and it's just not there yet nor will it be anytime soon and that is not Adobe's fault.

Eric

ADK

[Todd_Kopriva]

> Unfortunately there are not nearly as many Mac users versus PC/Windows users so the market share puts the Mac users at a disadvantage for R&D dollars.

Eric, that's not correct... at least not for our applications and users. We find that there is a roughly even split between Mac OS and Windows among our users, and we treat each with equivalent concern.

Very generally speaking, we do have a special set of considerations with regard to Mac OS and Mac hardware, since Apple makes changes much more rapidly in these areas, so it can be more difficult for us to hit their moving target.

[RiderProd]

hello

I just bought a mac pro to pro apple store.

I am over performance in After Effect

A computer € 7,000 is not working 100% in after effect ???? !!!!

Do you have a solution propose to me ???

[NordicFilmworks]

RiderProd wrote:

hello

I just bought a mac pro to pro apple store.

I am over performance in After Effect

A computer € 7,000 is not working 100% in after effect ???? !!!!

Do you have a solution propose to me ???

What's the performance issue?  RAM allocation? Crashing? etc...

[tallscot]

After Effects CC 2015 still doesn't utilize GPU. Sad.

I've switched to Apple's Motion. It uses the dual GPU in my Mac Pro and screams. Even particles play in real time with no RAM preview render needed.