Both After Effects CS 6 (well-suited software in a 3D configurator project) and After Effects CC use the GPU on their graphics cards for some special processing types.
The GPU features in After Effects CS6 and later can be divided into 3 categories:
- GPU-accelerated 3D renderer based on the raytracing algorithm.
- Fast Draft Mode and Hardware BlitPipe (OpenGL with slightly higher requirements
- OpenGL Swap Buffer (OpenGL with slightly lower requirements)
Important note: After Effects does not require CUDA features of a specific Nvidia GPU. Only the GPU accelerated 3D renderer, which is based on the raytracing algorithm, requires this. The other GPU features run on any GPU that meets some basic requirements, including AMD and Intel GPUs.
An important point for users of After Effects CS5.5 and older: The previous OpenGL renderer was deliberately omitted because it ran quite unreliably except for the OpenGL interactive mode. The OpenGL features in After Effects CS6 and later versions have been rebuilt and are not designed to solve the same problems as the previous OpenGL renderer.
If you have any questions regarding this topic, please feel free to contact us by e-mail (marketing@viscircle.com).
You should make sure that you have installed the After Effects CC (12.2) update and the After Effects CS6 (11.0.4) update, which contain corrections and changes to the OptiX library for the raytracing based 3D renderer, which improve VRAM processing, prevent crashes, and raise the overall user experience in this area to a higher level.
GPU accelerated renderers based on the raytracing algorithm.
After Effect CS6 and higher have a 3D environment in which you can bend 2D layers, extrude test and shapes, and do many other cool things.
The raytracing based 3D renderer can run on the CPU, but is rather slow in Final Quality mode. That`s why After Effects also has a GPU-accelerated 3D renderer. To use the GPU accelerated and raytracing based 3D renderer, you need a specific Nvidia graphics card. The GPU acceleration of the raytracing based 3D renderer depends on Nvidia`s OptiX library, which CUDA needs on a Nvidia GPU.
If you receive a warning that the GPU accelerated raytracing based 3D renderer does not have enough free disk space to work, see the following page to learn how to fix this problem.
The graphics card that After Effects can use for the GPU accelerated and raytracing based 3D renderer can be found ind the system requirements.
It is important that you install the latest driver for your graphics card. You can update the CUDA driver from the CUDA panel in System Preferences.
After Effects CC (12.1) and later require CUDA version 5.0 or later because the OptiX 3.0 library has been updated by Nvidia.
If your GPU is not supported or you have an old driver, the raytracing based 3D renderer will be rendered on the CPU with all physical cores.
If you have multiple GPUs installed, the GPU accelerated raytracing 3D renderer will use the CUDA cores on all if you have the same CUDA computing level. After Effects will also use all VRAM on the installed GPU`s, with the proviso that both cards will be treated as if they had the same amount of VRAM on the lower graphics card.
The reason why the GPU accelerated and raytracing based 3D renderer is limited to working with only one particular GPU is simple and is testing. This way After Effects should run stable and reliable on all common graphics cards.
Leave A Comment