Considering cancelling my Mac Pro order. No speed benefits in FCPX / Compressor

[joema2]

...If Apple & Adobe can encode video within their video editing applications so can others. While quicksync is nice its also limited, something that can be programmed into existing applications using the GPU...

It's unclear if Adobe is using either Quick Sync or GPU acceleration for export and transcoding. The latest Premiere Pro version I have (CS6) does not seem to, and Adobe hasn't mentioned it on CC, nor have any reviews observed the expected speedup if they were.

Page 10 of Intel's IDF13 white paper implies a GPU just can't accelerate transcoding to the degree Quick Sync can -- but it's much more flexible. Once Quick Sync falls off its "sweet spot", the hardware acceleration vanishes, and the task becomes slow.

Also there's a lot more to workstation-class tasks than transcoding. Just today I was using Photoshop CC's new "Shake Reduction" feature. It can produce amazing sharpening improvement, but on my 2013 iMac 27 with 3.5Ghz i7 and GTX-780M, it's pretty slow. It becomes aggravating to tweak it much, as you're always waiting. If I did that much and if the nMP was substantially faster, it would be well worth the price. Shake Reduction seems to be mostly CPU limited, although it uses multiple active threads and also GPU activity is visible on iStat Menus. Either way a 6 core or above nMP would be nice.

 

[linuxcooldude]

It's unclear if Adobe is using either Quick Sync or GPU acceleration for export and transcoding. The latest Premiere Pro version I have (CS6) does not seem to, and Adobe hasn't mentioned it on CC, nor have any reviews observed the expected speedup if they were.

Adobe specifically mentions supporting Dual GPU on the nMP, but only in export only. Also only in the Creative Cloud version. Considering QuickSync is not a Xeon feature it has to be the GPU.

 

[joema2]

Adobe specifically mentions supporting Dual GPU on the nMP, but only in export only...

Yes, they say that, however they also claimed CS6 used the GPU for export, when in fact it did not. The basis for this claim was IF you had a timeline with lots of effects, and no intermediate renders were ever done, at final export those effects would be done by the GPU. However the actual encoding (the slowest part) was not GPU-assisted.

Nonetheless, it appears portions of Premiere Pro CC have been completely re-written to use OpenCL, which is great for nMP owners. Adobe does mention GPU-assisted export, although I don't know if this is legitimate or like CS6 was. I've seen some benchmarks showing much faster export vs CS6 on the same Xeon hardware (which doesn't have Quick Sync), so it may be real.

This is a transcript of some 2013 Apple WWDC talks on OpenCL. Part way down, David McGavran (Premiere Pro Sr. Engineering Manager) discusses CC's use of OpenCL. Much work has already been implemented, and more is soon to come. Apple is doing likewise. http://asciiwwdc.com/2013/sessions/508

Apple's emphasis of powerful dual GPUs on the nMP is a forward-looking strategy based on the growing trend toward GPU-assisted computing. Unlike the old days when you had to buy a faster computer, the latent GPU and multi-core performance of a nMP can be further exploited with a software upgrade. Hopefully this will cheer up any current or prospective nMP owners.

 

[wildmac]

Yes, they say that, however they also claimed CS6 used the GPU for export, when in fact it did not. The basis for this claim was IF you had a timeline with lots of effects, and no intermediate renders were ever done, at final export those effects would be done by the GPU. However the actual encoding (the slowest part) was not GPU-assisted.

Nonetheless, it appears portions of Premiere Pro CC have been completely re-written to use OpenCL, which is great for nMP owners. Adobe does mention GPU-assisted export, although I don't know if this is legitimate or like CS6 was. I've seen some benchmarks showing much faster export vs CS6 on the same Xeon hardware (which doesn't have Quick Sync), so it may be real.

This is a transcript of some 2013 Apple WWDC talks on OpenCL. Part way down, David McGavran (Premiere Pro Sr. Engineering Manager) discusses CC's use of OpenCL. Much work has already been implemented, and more is soon to come. Apple is doing likewise. http://asciiwwdc.com/2013/sessions/508

Apple's emphasis of powerful dual GPUs on the nMP is a forward-looking strategy based on the growing trend toward GPU-assisted computing. Unlike the old days when you had to buy a faster computer, the latent GPU and multi-core performance of a nMP can be further exploited with a software upgrade. Hopefully this will cheer up any current or prospective nMP owners.

Of course, there's a flip side to that, if you read the Ars Technica review. From his vantage point, GPU computing has come, died and is buried again.

So what's a person who just wants to get some work done to do?

 

[linuxcooldude]

Yes, they say that, however they also claimed CS6 used the GPU for export, when in fact it did not. The basis for this claim was IF you had a timeline with lots of effects, and no intermediate renders were ever done, at final export those effects would be done by the GPU. However the actual encoding (the slowest part) was not GPU-assisted.

My statement was directed to the newer Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Adobe CS6 is the old discontinued version which is probably not going to be updated other then perhaps bug fixes and the like.

Adobe is making a lot of new performance enhancements also to Adobe Media Encoder, to utilize OpenCL and Multiple GPU's in the new versions.