Is it true that After Effects uses only the CPU when rendering video, in other words, it does not take advantage of a GPU?

I know AE uses the GPU for things like 3D and ray tracing, but when it comes to a simple video render, AE uses only the CPU, right?

thanks,
Rich

Hi Rich.

Is it true that After Effects uses only the CPU when rendering video, in other words, it does not take advantage of a GPU?

I know AE uses the GPU for things like 3D and ray tracing, but when it comes to a simple video render, AE uses only the CPU, right?

Short answer: AE does not support GPU-Acceleration (CUDA/OpenCL).

Adobe is improving application performance by several means, only one of which is GPU accelleration. Check Adobe's statement here:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3377595

At the end it says: "The term 'Mercury Playback Engine' refers to Premiere Pro. It has nothing to do with After Effects. After Effects CS5 is a 64-bit application, and it has been multithreaded for a long time, so those improvements are there. But After Effects doesn't use CUDA (though a few third-party plug-ins do)."

This also seems to be true for CS 6 and OpenCL.

/Marcus

Thank you for the response. I read the informative Adobe article.

I thought I may be missing something in AE but I see I was not. AE benefits from more cores, not a GPU.

thanks,
Rich