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 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.