Picking the right graphics card (GPU) is critical for video editing applications. When both PCs and Macs shipped with nVidia GPUs loaded with CUDA cores this was pretty simple. Apple has since abandoned nVidia and gone with AMD. The new Mac Pro gets most of its performance gains from having two powerful AMD Sapphire graphics cards. Apple cut a tremendous deal with AMD, allowing them to keep the price of the Mac Pro much lower then any competitive machine can be built with the same GPUs. As you would expect, FCPX is optimized for OpenCL. Adobe & Avid continue to deliver better permance with CUDA acceleration. This article does a nice job explaining why and what the differences are.
CreatePro by Tom
If you’re looking for more information on CUDA and OpenCL, this is the article for you. We’ll give you a brief overview of what GPGPU is and look at how AMD, Nvidia, OpenCL & CUDA fit into the mix. Finally we will explain which applications work best with which brand of graphics cards, providing a list that gives a brief overview of CUDA/OpenCL support in a wide variety of professional apps.
Introduction to GPGPU
(General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units)
If you’ve never heard of GPGPU or GPU acceleration, don’t worry, most people haven’t. OpenCL and CUDA, however, are terms that are starting to become more and more prevalent in the professional computing sector. OpenCL and CUDA are software frameworks that allow GPGPU to accelerate processing in applications where they are respectively supported.
So what exactly is GPGPU, or general purpose computing on graphics processing units? GPGPU is the utilisation of a GPU (graphics processing unit), which would typically only handle computer graphics, to assist in performing tasks that are traditionally handled solely by the CPU (central processing unit). read more...
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