Posted on Monday, December 14 2009 @ 23:59 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
reports Adobe will only develop Premiere Pro CS5's new Mercury Playback Engine for NVIDIA CUDA. The new engine promises significant performance enhancements, but for now it will only be available for NVIDIA GPUs because AMD's OpenCL API is still too buggy to get it to work.
The reason for this decision wasn't a move akin to "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" affairs such as Batmangate or Assassin's Creed, but something more simpler: Adobe needed a stable software toolkit to work on it and according to Dennis: "The 64-bit native code has been announced and now we bring in NVIDIA CUDA technology to be the icing on the cake and a powerful new engine to squeeze out performance in Premiere Pro. Before I wax philosophic on GPU, let me officially tip my hat to the incredible engineers at Adobe and their work here for the Mercury Playback Engine."
If you are wondering what is the real deal with GPGPU API's, there is a telling tale of why Adobe opted to base its Mercury Engine on nVidia's CUDA language. While AMD will tell you that they're all for open standards and push OpenCL, the sad truth is that the company representatives will remain shut when you ask them about the real status of their OpenCL API - especially if you quote them a lead developer from a AAA software company with 10x more employees than AMD themselves that goes something like this: "I struggled to even get ATI's beta drivers installed and working, it was just problem after problem. Maybe once ATI gets their drivers out of beta and actually allow you to install them then I will have some performance numbers. I mean at this point AMD is so far behind in development tools they are not even worth pursuing right now."
