Apple's Metal 8x faster Rendering?

[christopherh706077]

Apple says their new METAL API will offer up to 8x faster rendering in Adobe After Effects when their next Mac OS launches. Is it true that we will see 8x faster render times during output of our After Effects sequences? I thought After Effects used the CPU to render. How does this work now with Metal?

[Rick Gerard]

I would have to understand Metal to answer that and I don't and I also don't expect that feature to be fully implemented in the next release of AE because AE CS15 will be released months before then next OS X is made available to the public.

[christopherh706077]

Thanks Rick. Wondering if anyone can shed some light on this. It sounds amazing if true that Metal means up to 8x faster render times on the Mac.

[Mylenium]

...and tomorrow NASA will launch their manned mission to Mars.... Pardon the sarcasm, but to believe that just installing a new operating system would accelerate a program is slightly naive. AE would still have to have all of its code to be rewritten to actually use the new APIs and even then the old rule of all specific acceleration applies: There's only so much you can do because you can't defeat the math of the underlying algorithms or the physical limitations of some computing stuff. Yes, some features will burn like crazy, but others not. That's no different than what you already get with existing OpenGL/ OpenCL/ CUDA implementations. You will have to see how it turns out, but personally I'm already seeing another debacle looming with cross-platform apps and two development branches based on different acceleration APIs on Windows and Mac.

Mylenium

[wideEyedPupil]

On OS X the Mercury optimisations are Nvidia only AFAIA. All current Macs ship with AMD GPU cards, so if metal can bring GPU vendor support for mercury to all the AMD GPUs that's a "good thing". 

[ultrastatic]

It's probably 8 times faster for some obscure old filter that nobody uses, 3 times faster for filters that are already very fast like Fast Blur so it's done in 0.03 sec instead of 0.1 sec, and just a bit faster for the useful stuff IF developers choose to do a total rewrite.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but the last time we had these incredible performance increases we got a faster Cartoon filter that hardly gets used.

[sciulli999]

True ultrastatic.... but Apple specifically mentioned After Effects during their conference. They could have just made some general, non-specific claim but it sounds like Adobe is working with Apple on having the Creative Cloud suite run on Metal.

[Todd_Kopriva · Accepted solution]

What was shown at WWDC is the result of some early experimentation with Metal to accelerate a few effects. We are investigating the best ways to use GPU acceleration, and this is one avenue of investigation.

Don't expect this to appear in the next publicly available version of After Effects.

[Mr Seaniepie]

Todd_Kopriva wrote:

Don't expect this to appear in the next publicly available version of After Effects.

Or probably ever. I have a lovely Mac Pro sitting here that is pretty much wasted because the dual gfx cards don't get used by any Adobe ware or Maxon ware. Software developers are not interested in individual platforms. If Metal ONLY works on Mac it will NEVER see the light of day in ANY dual platform software. Even if we could get 8x performance out of it!! The coding between Mac and Windows would become so diverse that it would no longer become efficient to code.

Adobe went down the whole CUDA route because ALL Macs and most performance PCs had Nvidia cards. Mac Pro went AMD Gfx Card and Adobe thought 'tough, we're not supporting OpenCL' so the Mac Pro will NEVER be 'fully' supported by Adobe. Hence why I'm sending my Mac Pro back to Apple. Even the new Retina iMac and MacBookPro is AMD Gfx. But still Adobe will not ever likely support them. It's back to the 'good old days' of when Adobe (and others) boycotted Apple from PremierePro and other apps because Apple keeps shifting the goal posts to the detriment of both the users and developers.

[ultrastatic]

I feel like this on my sceptical days, but mostly I think that if the benefits are great enough than developers will follow. Adobe used to have some altivec optimisations back in the PowerPC days.

[wideEyedPupil]

There's a bunch of state of the art 3D application developers that develop for both OS X and Windows|Linux and presumably the code base has not 'become so diverse that it would no longer become efficient to code'. The Foundary make a few cross platform Film and TV Applications.

Apple have used a mix of Nvidia and AMD GPUs in various models for the last decade, so I don't think there was ever any concept that the goal post was Nvidia and CUDA. If you can say anything great about OpenCL, it's that multi-vendor-multi-processor was the most recent goal post.

[Climberfx]

This remember me how many versions of DirectX (the similar to Metal on Windows) versions needed to evolve, in conjunction to the evolution of graphics boards compatibility, from both Nvidia and AMD, to start to be stable and fast in the same time.

So yet, we can get a much faster After and all Adobes, but stable and in all current generation macs, i don't believe it.

So, prepare your pocked, hold on your finances (preferably brasilians, the dollar still going up, 3,5x times expensive now), because the hole will be a lot lower then you expect, and in a long time  delay.

But will be!

Talk again in 2 years plus.

p.s.: in the bright side, games will be as much as good on Mac as it is on Windows

[ultrastatic]

Few years ago everyone was on board to jump into OpenCL including Adobe according to Apple. In reality developers were merely interested and looking into it, and we all know how that panned out. Apple (or Kronos?) let OpenCL die but it seems that they are actually devoted to Metal.

[ArsenR]

Not really. They already have early versions of the code and it can handle some pretty serious effects. WWDC - Metal avec Adobe After Effects et Illustrator - vidéo dailymotion

[woush]

"Apple says their new METAL API will offer up to 8x faster rendering in Adobe After Effects when their next Mac OS launches. Is it true that we will see 8x faster render times during output of our After Effects sequences? I thought After Effects used the CPU to render. How does this work now with Metal?"

Actually its not ALL about the OS... it's about Adobe re-coding some stuff to let After Effects use the GPU on your machine instead of only using the CPU.

CPU power havent improved as fast as GPU in the last few years that's why its important now...

Have you tried Final Cut before? You can basically edit a 4k video with 20 + effects on it and still be able to scrub on your timeline in realtime (good luck scrubbing your 1920x1080 video with no effects in after effects......) (How many effects can FCPX playback on RED 4K media without frame dropping? - YouTube)

I might be wrong but that's what I understood from all of this!

And sorry for my english.

"Pardon the sarcasm, but to believe that just installing a new operating system would accelerate a program is slightly naive"

... :T

[D Dog]

Exactly...performance is becoming an issue with Adobe's chosen development,

[louruiz]

Adobe Backpedals on Commitment to Bring Metal to After Effects - Mac Rumors

[IshayFrenkel]

According to: https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/features.html

Finally, in the 20 June 2016 update (Premiere 2015.3) Adobe starts to support Apple Metal.

I guess that's the case for AE too, and will lead to greater support in the future.

[Szalam]

Yes, AE uses OpenCL and Metal on Mac to accelerate some effects in the version released today.