Announced at NAB 2018, AMD’s Radeon Pro SSG is setting its sights on 4K and 8K video with a monster GPU.
Adobe’s new version of Premiere Pro CC, which was also released at NAB this year, supports the new GPU natively. Codecs and resolutions that should have acceptable playback are: REDCODE RAW; ARRI AMIRA; Sony’s XDCAM, XAVC and raw; Canon XF and raw; Panasonic’s P2 and AVC. Basically, this GPU will cut through high resolution footage like butter. That’s an insane amount of power, and it’s reassuring that Adobe’s getting behind this too.
The card relies on the “Vega” architecture from before. As a result, I’m wondering if it will also work with Mac OS in an eGPU setup, not just a custom PC. Perhaps we’ll need to wait for AMD and Adobe to specify which “validated workstation platforms” we’ll see this workflow on. Wasim Ahmed was talking to them, and he confirmed that Final Cut Pro X support isn’t ready yet – but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming. Could you imagine this much power being utilized as an external GPU by a MacBook Pro? Totally inappropriate but it’s fitting that Apple is getting behind this breed of GPU.
The specs put a huge grin on my face, but the price obviously doesn't.
The Radeon Pro SSG will come packed with a 16GB cache which will see the benefit of the “High Bandwidth Cache Controller.” This will dramatically help with Adobe After Effect’s performance, adding another reason to like this card. We now also know that there’s nothing particularly useful for VR/360 video content (other than the sheer power of course).
Native support for Premiere Pro is already available, and we’ll get word on particular workstations and setups that will suit this best soon. The card costs about $5,000, and you can pick it up now – unfortunately, that’s the same price as a base model iMac Pro (which comes stocked with a Radeon Pro Vega 56). This also means that it’s over double the price of the Radeon Pro WX9100, now the little brother to the SSG.
Can the iMac Pro smoothly do 8k video?
Depends how you define “do”.
Most of the configurations are good for playback.
For editing, you might want to scale things a bit depending on the NLE.
I'll take that as a "no"...
I’m sure this card has a market but if you want a card “for premiere pro” it NEEDS to have CUDA which means any Nvidia card.
Why? CUDA sucks just as much as every other technology if your GPU is waiting for new data in your RAM which is waiting for new data on your disk. Because it's not doing anything.
This has been around for a few years, what's interesting is that it integrates a NVMe drive directly onto the card and needs specific drivers to access if I remember rightly. So unless AMD has released a SDK for this MacOS is out of luck. This is a card designed for Hollywood and CGI pipelines as much as it's about video.
MacOS has build in support for this model as of 10.13.4
We might be the first to try it, although it’s ridiculously expensive.
/gianluca
//biglittlefrank.dk
Title of the article is a bit backwards, but it is good to see that somebody has finally made an effort to natively take advantage of what the Radeon Pro SSG brought to the market almost a year ago.
This is the only Pro GPU that allows 4K and 8K editing without having to segment the video into sections. You can edit a high res piece with exponentially fewer segmentations or do it all at once in a continuous stream if the piece isn't too large.
Adobe has just made this the must have piece of hardware for anybody seriously into 4K and up video editing. Two editors can now do what once took ten editors in the same time frame.
As for the price, there are plenty of pro GPUs that cost the same or more but are much less capable.
Thank you, Adobe.
The problem: you get less performance with eGPUs connected via thunderbolt/ usb 3.1 compared to installing the graphics card directly to a motherboard's PCI E x16...
But the biggest issue would be: if cryptominers find out this card to be good for them... then good luck finding one at MSRP...
“Oh wow this sounds great I’ll have to get one...” “The card costs $5000” .... “ok never mind”
The 16GB are not Cache. They are RAM made for GPU's. In this case HBM2.
😮 no proxy files needed?
The next generation of video cards will be amazing.
Thanks to the pros that buy this 😁