Adobe Brings OpenCL Support to AMD Graphics Cards in Windows, Boasts Real-Time Video Editing Performance

While Adobe is busily showing off its latest and greatest wares at NAB 2013 this week, AMD is banging the drum for the major upgrades that it helped bake into the next version of Adobe Premiere Pro software.

While Mac users have of late enjoyed the graphical power of OpenCL with either NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards, Windows users were forced to use NVIDIA’s CUDA only. Now, however, AMD and Adobe have enabled OpenCL support on Windows systems with AMD APUs and GPUs.

“Our customers require powerful systems that enable them to work quickly and efficiently. While we already support OpenCL on the Mac, today’s announcement gives creative professionals the opportunity to tap into the massive compute resources of AMD APUs and GPUs on Windows-based PCs, broadening the type of accelerated experience they can have with our upcoming software,” said Simon Williams, director of strategic relations at Adobe.

Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro

For AMD, this is a huge development, as it effectively expands the potential number of Adobe Premiere Pro customers that run systems with AMD graphics and allows the company to compete more directly with NVIDIA in this space. AMD likely especially sees good things to come for its line of FirePro professional/workstation-class GPUs.

AMD FirePro
AMD FirePro

In addition to Windows availability, AMD and Adobe claim that new enhancements to Adobe Premiere Pro will enable real-time video editing for quality as high as 4K Ultra HD and many effects, and the new version will offer support for the Lumetri color engine, multi-stream and mixed format accelerated workflows, and AMD’s Eyefinity multi-display capabilities.