Adobe reverses course, says Metal support in After Effects 'one possibility' [u]
Despite promises at this June's Worldwide Developers Conference hosted by Apple, Adobe is now adopting an ambiguous stance on whether After Effects will support Apple's Metal graphics technology.
"We are currently exploring various technologies for GPU acceleration, and Metal is one possibility, but we have made no commitment to any specific GPU acceleration technology at this time," said Adobe's Todd Kopriva in an official forum post.
During the WWDC keynote Adobe helped demonstrate Metal for Mac, and an engineer promised that the company was "committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications," other examples including Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.
Kopriva -- the leader of the After Effects team -- suggested that what was shown was "the result of one experiment." He admitted, however, that the WWDC presentation "sent a confusing message."
Metal is a developer API intended to allow better access to graphics processing hardware. Though it originally debuted in iOS 8, the technology is now a part of OS X El Capitan, released last week. It could in theory bring major performance improvements to games and graphics-heavy productivity apps like After Effects.
Update: David McGavran, Adobe's director of engineering for professional audio and video, said in a follow-up statement that while the company is committed to the Mac platform, it tries to set realistic expectations as to when specific product advancements come to market. He reiterated Adobe's comments from June, saying, "Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications, such as Illustrator and After Effects I showed you today, as well as Photoshop and Premiere Pro. We are very excited to see what Metal can do for our Creative Cloud users."
"We are currently exploring various technologies for GPU acceleration, and Metal is one possibility, but we have made no commitment to any specific GPU acceleration technology at this time," said Adobe's Todd Kopriva in an official forum post.
During the WWDC keynote Adobe helped demonstrate Metal for Mac, and an engineer promised that the company was "committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications," other examples including Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.
Kopriva -- the leader of the After Effects team -- suggested that what was shown was "the result of one experiment." He admitted, however, that the WWDC presentation "sent a confusing message."
Metal is a developer API intended to allow better access to graphics processing hardware. Though it originally debuted in iOS 8, the technology is now a part of OS X El Capitan, released last week. It could in theory bring major performance improvements to games and graphics-heavy productivity apps like After Effects.
Update: David McGavran, Adobe's director of engineering for professional audio and video, said in a follow-up statement that while the company is committed to the Mac platform, it tries to set realistic expectations as to when specific product advancements come to market. He reiterated Adobe's comments from June, saying, "Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications, such as Illustrator and After Effects I showed you today, as well as Photoshop and Premiere Pro. We are very excited to see what Metal can do for our Creative Cloud users."
Comments
Adobe lying? Say it isn't so!
Incredible that they have so few viable competitors out there.
Incredible that they have so few viable competitors out there.
Apple need to step it up with Motion.
why Adobe - y u no have brain
Maybe its because if you can tap into the graphics processor on a Mac with Metal, it is at best a mobile graphics card or 3 year old tech?
Such a shitty company
David McGavran
Director of Engineering
Adobe Professional Audio and Video
Why doesn't Apple just buy this company?
They don't want to sell? Just a guess...
Agreed.
Better and less hassle to help fund Affinity.
I fear that is going to join Aperture. I am a die hard Apple fan but really wish pro apps were something I could depend on going forward.
Quote:
Adobe stop acting like Adobe.
Adobe lying? Say it isn't so!
Adobe is large enough to have a lot of internal tools, so that supporting a new framework may require significant work. If they were conducting internal tests at the time, would you really expect an immediate answer? The difference with Apple is that they just remain silent during these periods, which is probably a good idea. That way they don't open themselves up to meaningless trolling.
That's too bad after seeing the preliminary results for Metal v without Metal on AnandTech's 6S-series testing.
You must not have read the article. It did exceptionally well in artificial benchmarks, and the improvements were precisely in the areas that Apple claimed. Anandtech suggested that this reduction in driver overhead lead to less expensive draw calls. It didn't show up as much in the form of performance improvements. That could change in future developments. If certain calls don't invoke the same amount of overhead, developers won't have to optimize their applications in a way that minimizes those specific api calls.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9223/gfxbench-3-metal-ios
The relatively small improvements in these real world benchmarks illustrate an important point about Metal, which is that it is not a magic bullet to boost graphics performance. While there will definitely be small improvements due to general API efficiency and lower overhead, Metal's real purpose is to enable new levels of visual fidelity that were previously not possible on mobile devices. An example of this is the Epic Zen Garden application from Epic Games. The app renders at 1440x1080 with 4x MSAA on the iPad, and it displays 3500 animated butterflies on the screen at the same time. This scene has an average of 4000 draw calls per frame, which is well above what can currently be achieved with OpenGL ES on mobile hardware.