Adobe CC - The big Cuda / OpenCL topic

[Roykor]

With the debate of which setup is the best for Adobe, i would like to seek an answer to go for an ATI card or an Nvidia card. Its not for an fight between the cards. Its about "what is the best gpu choice at this moment if you work in Adobe all day long".

I think i am leaning towards an Nvidia setup. Simply to have best from both worlds. But if only a tiny percentage is using Cuda, than maybe an ATI will perform better. It looks like ATI is doing a better job in OpenCL.

How much of Cuda (Nvidia) is Adobe using in there tools? Its a question i found hard to get some simply answers. The website of Adobe isn't really clear like an list of filters using the Cuda cores. And Nvidia isnt really clear to what parts in Adobe are using Cuda.

There is also an "Mercury Playback Engine", which can or is using Cuda too. You can see that Nvidia has invested a lot in there Cuda program and i am sure they work closely with Adobe too, just like AMD is doing.

I have read here on the forum that Adobe is using less and less Cuda these days and are switching to OpenCL where they can. But i can not back that up from any news source. Specially not from Adobe them self. I even discovered that extra Cuda tools are build-in lately.

I know that Premiere Pro is using a whole list of accelerators using Cuda. You can find the list here.

But what about Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. How much of Cuda is helping you and what tools / filters are using Cuda. I can not make this really clear.

I really can use some help about this and collecting a bunch of information into this topic like articles and benchmarks. I know there are many others out there having the same question. If will edit / update this startpost with links to Cuda / OpenCL information.

What is using Cuda / links to articles and benchmarks:

Adobe Premiere
- Adobe article - quite a big list of Cuda accelerated filters: here

Adobe After Effects
- Raytracer is moved from Cuda to OpenCL

Adobe Illustrator
- Mercury Playback Engine (partly using Cuda) at this moment not clear what is accelerated by cuda

Adobe Photoshop
- Some filters are using Cuda, itsnt clear which one

 

[vladi]

At this point CUDA is way superior to OpenCL, not just in performance but in implementation that is a lot easier and stable.

But ..

Many developers who support both Windows and MacOS are switching to OpenCL because you guessed it MacOS. They are sacrificing the nVidia advantage to gain more users and save some money on development, perfect example is After Effects. What will happen in the end is that Apple will screw them all out by crippling OpenCL and implementing and insisting on Metal all over their product range. Seen that before.

Currently nVidia is king of GPU arena, I am not fond of any proprietary technology but at this moment it cannot be denied that CUDA runs better than OpenCL. Leading GPU renderers rely on CUDA and were CUDA only just last year, things started to change and some did introduce OpenCL but CUDA remains the best GPU workflow for them. Also many grading apps such as Resolve or SCRATCH still hold on to CUDA as well.

I can tell you that if you need GPU power nothing beats Tesla + Quadro today. Hopefully that will change tomorrow.

One word of advice though: be careful with nVidia in MBPs, consistent usage will degrade your laptop life as chip is likely to melt.