Mercury Playback a Champion on Unsupported GPUs & First Thoughts on CS6

By Kylee Wall

I upgraded to Adobe Master Collection CS6 yesterday and thought I’d share a few thoughts and tips I’ve gathered so far. And I’m aware of how cheesy this post’s title is, it’s ok. Eventually the Queen references will die, no thanks to me. I’m sorry.

It’s important to note that I was previously on CS4 and OSX Lion. After Effects and Photoshop crashed daily and refused to quit so force quitting them was a daily chore. After upgrading, I have had absolutely no issues in this area with CS6. So already my quality of life has improved.

I use After Effects a lot, so I played around with putting CS6 through some rigors. I’m not sure how fast it really is, but to me it seems like it’s screaming fast. The Global Performance Cache is really doing what they said it would do. I was having a freaking field day moving a solid around my comp’s timeline, watching the bar stay green over everything but where I placed the solid, then become green again after moving the solid. Wee! The RAM previews are fast, and so much easier to work with now that I can take full advantage of all my RAM.

I ran into some issues with the 3D ray tracing. I have a mid-2010 Macbook Pro, so my Nvidia GPU is not technically supported. When I tried to do some simple extruding, I got an out of memory error for ray tracing. However, I was alerted to the fact that through an unsupported “hack”…no, let’s call it a nudge – through this little nudge, I can enable CUDA GPU support. read more...