OpenCL vs. CUDA in After Effects

Ryan Farnes

Ryan Farnes

Well-known member
It appears that while AMD GPUs have gotten plenty of love with OpenCL within Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC still only does full acceleration with specific CUDA GPUs. However, "full acceleration" seems to mean that it simply accelerates ray tracing. From what I can tell, AMD GPUs still accelerate other basic functions within After Effects. Although my ability to interpret what I'm reading and associate it with the actual kind of work I do within AE is hard.

I simply cannot find definitive information about it. Can anyone here succinctly define which types of things a non-CUDA card will be limited from doing? I had thought ray tracing was a rather niche thing that I don't even utilize in AE. Am I correct in that assumption that ray tracing is a rather niche thing? If I do any 3D, it'll be with Element 3D or Cinema 4D Lite. Do I need a CUDA card?
 
Got it.

So, the fact I don't recall ever switching from Classic 3D to ray-traced 3D is probably a good indication that this is a feature irrelevant to me? Or do many in the motion graphics community make use of the AE ray-traced renderer?
 
The ray-traced 3D renderer is a good way to get very simple extruded text or vector graphics with reflections, refractions, etc.

As soon as you go beyond "very simple", you'll want to use Cinema 4D or one of the Zaxwerks plug-ins.
 
Ryan Farnes said:
So, the fact I don't recall ever switching from Classic 3D to ray-traced 3D is probably a good indication that this is a feature irrelevant to me? Or do many in the motion graphics community make use of the AE ray-traced renderer?
Click to expand...

You should check it out at least. It's actually pretty cool and makes for a quick and easy way to add some nice 3D effects to your titles. You can use it without a CUDA card, but it will be slooooooooooooooow.
 
Thanks for the input all. I'm settling into getting the GTX 760 card. To both utilize CUDA within AE if needed and also within Blender which exclusively relies on CUDA for GPU acceleration in rendering.
 
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