AMD and Adobe recently announced expanded OpenCL support for Adobe Premiere Pro CC at NAB 2013, including multi-stream and mixed format 6X accelerated workflows with real-time effects, color grading and finishing with hardware-accelerated rendering to the chosen final destination format.
Premiere Pro CC: Today AMD announced support for additional OpenCL-accelerated features with the announcement of Adobe Premiere Pro CC including OpenCL hardware-powered rendering with Adobe Media Encoder CC for Adobe Premiere Pro CC projects and multi-GPU support. This enables users to queue up multiple Adobe Premiere Pro CC projects to be rendered using all available GPU horsepower in the background. There are now over 40 GPU-accelerated features using OpenCL in Premiere Pro CC.
PhotoShop CC: New and enhanced Adobe Photoshop CC features have also been added to the dozens of existing open hardware accelerated features in Adobe Photoshop CC:
Adobe's all-new Smart Sharpen filter leverages OpenCL and AMD graphics technology to sharpen images faster1 while minimizing halo effects on distinct edges and providing precise noise reduction control
The enhanced Blur Gallery harnesses the power of OpenCL and AMD graphics technology to deliver mouse-down previews quickly, accurately and with high on-screen resolution of up to a million pixels. High quality instant on-screen and in-context feedback allows artists to work more efficiently without unnecessary disruptions to the creative workflow. Non-destructive hardware-accelerated Blur Gallery effects are applied as Smart Objects to create a desired look for images and even video within Photoshop CC
Performance enhancements have also been made to the Liquify effect so that creative professionals can now push, pull, rotate, reflect, pucker, or bloat selected image areas to achieve unique artistic effects with greater speed2 while working with even the largest images
Both Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC fully support advanced display technologies such as 4K and AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology.
Desktop Engineering has published an article on CPU vs GPU computing for engineering and CAD. The article discusses using the Open Standard OpenCL programming framework, as well as Nvidia’s proprietary Cuda option. OpenCL can be used to give an application access to a GPU for non-graphical computing , such as engineering data analysis or simulation. Importantly offers the ability to use both CPUs and GPUs in combination.
AMD has integrated OpenCL as its programming framework for its FirePro family of GPUs, as well as its CPU and APU offerings. As noted by BSN AMD’s focus on OpenCL puts them in a competitive advantage against Nvidia as many of the compute programs out there tend to run faster on AMD hardware if they are optimized correctly.
This PDF article on "The OpenCL Revolution" describes how 10 leading DCC, CAD and simulation software applications tap OpenCL running on AMD Firepro GPUs to accelerate their applications and enable new functionality.
The summary takeaways:
OpenCL on the GPU speeds up complex tasks
OpenCL opens up new ways of working, in some cases cutting computation time form days to minutes
OpenCL is hardware-agnostic
OpenCL enables write once, run anywhere accelerated code
OpenCL cuts development time
Mobile developer back OpenCL
AMD FirePro GPUs fully support the latest versions of OpenCL and AMD actively works with software developers to enable their applications for OpenCL/GPU acceleration
Some of the leading CAD, DCC and simulation tools currently use OpenCL
Developer
Software
Key tasks accelerated
Speed Boost over CPU
eyeon
Fusion
Compositing
>1,000
OPTIS
THEIA-RT
Final-quality rendering
50-100
AcceleReyes
Jacket
Executing MATLAB code
3-100
DEM Solutions
EDEM
Simulation of particulate materials
5-10
Chaos Group
V-Ray
Preview rendering
5-10
Autodesk
Maya
Fluid simulation
Blend Shape deformation
5-10
3-5
Side Effects Software
Houdini
Fire and smoke simulation
2
Adobe Systems
Photoshop
Premiere Pro
Painting and image processing
Video editing and processing
Vratis announced a collaboration with the AMD FirePro team to bring OpenCL acceleration to Vratis’ SpeedIT technology for OpenFOAM and physical simulations.
The library can be used in a wide spectrum of domains such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), electromagnetics, thermodynamics, materials, acoustics, computer vision and graphics, robotics, semiconductor devices and structural engineering.
The implementation of OpenCL support will bring OpenFOAM to the wider range of users and provide the first steps towards acceleration of CFD on OpenCL-enabled devices.
From the press release: “With SpeedIT, Vratis has demonstrated its ability to develop products that are capable of efficiently utilizing the massively parallel compute capability of today’s graphics processors,” said David Cummings, senior director of AMD Professional Graphics. “We want to support their efforts to move their leading-edge SpeedIT product into an OpenCL-based environment so that a much larger user base has access to a tremendous tool for computational fluid dynamic research and simulation.”
The AMD 2013 Developer Summit has been announced. The Developer Summit is the evolution of the very successful AFDS held for the past two years in Bellevue WA. Last year there were more than 150 heterogeneous computing technical sessions along with keynote presentations by Microsoft, ARM, Adobe, and Cloudera as well as AMD.
This year the summit moves to San Jose CA and the dates change from mid-June to November 11-14. AMD is accepting presentation proposals until March 15, 2013. Topics can be on any of the following:
Many booths at SC12 were showing off AMD FirePro acceleration solutions, including Altair, AccelerEyes, CEI, and CAPS. Even more booths were showing off OpenCL support!
At this year's Siemens PLM NX CAE Symposium 2012, the Siemens PLM and FirePro teams demonstrated a prototype of NX Nastran finite element analysis solver, accelerated using OpenCL and AMD FirePro GCN cards.
The availability of fast approximate eigensolvers such as RDMODES makes it possible to compute a large number of modes over a wide frequency range economically. However, the modal frequency response calculation can be resource intensive for a large modal space. This project accelerated this computation in NX Nastran using OpenCL on the AMD FirePro W9000 card.
The results of the FirePro/OpenCL acceleration for NX Nastran Modal Frequency Response:
Up to 25x faster than serial
Up to 4x faster than the top of the line 24-core CPU run time
Update Nov 28, 2012: According to Siemens PLM, the enablement of GPU’s is planned for the next major release of NX Nastran scheduled for later in 2013. More details will be available at that time.
At the NX CAE Symposium 2012, Antoine Reymond from AMD will be speaking on using high performance GPUs and OpenCL to accelerate modal frequency response calculations in NX Nastran finite element solver software. This solution makes it possible to compute a large number of modes over a wide frequency range, economically and efficiently.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
4:00pm - 4:20pm
“Accelerating modal frequency response in NX Nastran with AMD GPUs”
Antoine Reymond, AMD and Leonard Hoffnung, Siemens PLM Software
This video from IBC 2012 shows a technology preview of Adobe Premiere Pro running an OpenCL-accelerated Mercury Playback engine on Windows using AMD FirePro graphics.
- OpenCL powered GPU and APU accelerated workflows on Windows
- Enhanced Adobe Mercury Playback Engine for blazingly fast performance
- Real-time editing, effects and transitions for uninterrupted workflows
- Over three dozen OpenCL accelerated effects and transitions
From Bill Roberts, Director of Video Product Management at Adobe: “We are extremely excited about the prospect of being able to tap into the massive compute resources of AMD APUs, AMD Radeon Graphics, and AMD FirePro Professional Graphics on Windows-based PCs, to expand the reach of OpenCL and the Mercury Playback Engine to bring even greater performance and productivity to Premiere Pro users everywhere”.
These demos from SIGGRAPH 2012 show an OpenCL-accelerated fluid solver in Autodesk Maya running on an AMD FirePro workstation graphics card. Frame rates that run at 0.1 fps on the CPU only version of the solver, jump to 10 fps when using OpenCL on the FirePro GPU.
The first video gives a good overview. The second video demo is given by one of the fluid solver developers with slightly more technical perspective.
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