RED GPU Video Card Decoding

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For RED Rocket decoding, you should have "Shot/Enable Prefetch" turned on. RED Rocket does not support decoding Dragon material. (RED Rocket-X might?) RED GPU Video Card Decoding

If you have a more recent video card with 2GB or more of video RAM, the RED GPU reader can provide much faster RED file decoding times, as much as ten times faster or more!

GPU Requirements: 2+ or maybe 3 GB of VRAM. CUDA 5.5 or higher with GPU compute capability 3.0 or higher (2.0 on mac), or OpenCL 1.1 or higher. (Specs according to RED.)

Note: The RED GPU decoder does not support decoding HDRx or ColorVersion1 files. Opening these files with the GPU reader active will cause the software reader to be successfully used instead, but you will want to turn

"Shot/Read 1f at a time" back off to maintain interactive performance while reading.

The real test of whether your video card is usable or not is to actually try it; we highly recommend that approach (yes, that's you, demo users).

When opening RED shots using the GPU, you have "Shot/Enable Prefetch" turned on to start with.

You can see whether your video card is being used the first time you open a RED shot after starting SynthEyes. When the shot setup dialog appears, the status line will provide information on whether CUDA or OpenCL are being used; if nothing appears, software will be used.

There are a substantial number of preferences affecting RED GPU Processing, as listed in the RED RAW section of the preferences. Note that these preferences all take effect the first time you open a RED file after starting SynthEyes. If you've already opened a RED file and change a RED preference, you'll need to restart SynthEyes to see the result.

The first and most important preference controls whether Rocket, CUDA, or OpenCL are used. By default ("Any Type"), they will be tried in that order. You can select one of the three, or disable them all and force software decoding.

Note : on macOS, you also have the option for Metal GPU decoding. If Metal is selected but can’t be used, the movie will not be displayed: with Metal selected, it cannot “fall back” to the other decoders, even the CPU decoder.

The second preference controls what CUDA or OpenCL device (video card) will be used, if there are more than one. By default (ALL), they will all be used, which may be fast, or may run your system out of memory. So you can also select the first, second, third, or fourth usable devices of that type. (This control does not affect Rocket, all Rockets are used.)

The remaining preferences are very technical. The tooltips on the preferences panel provide some description based on RED's explanations. If you are working with a lot of RED footage and want to experiment with a stopwatch, you might consider trying some different settings and timing the resulting performance... but probably not.

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