What you need to know
- Adobe Dimension, Substance Alchemist, and Premiere Pro apps are now boosted by NVIDIA RTX tech.
- A new NVIDIA Studio Driver brings up to 12% performance gain in select Adobe apps.
- Two new RTX workstations from BOXX — the APEXX W4L and APEXX S3 — have been unveiled.
Three of Adobe's creative and design apps — Dimension, Substance Alchemist, and Premiere Pro — are now capable of taking advantage of NVIDIA RTX features available with only the best graphics cards out there. This development kicks off Adobe MAX, the annual creativity conference that highlights developments in the design world.
First off, Adobe Dimension, a 3D design app, can now take advantage of RTX ray tracing capabilities to significantly speed up 3D rendering. This will allow designers to see dynamic lighting, reflections, and shadows without as much wait time. Ross McKegney, Adobe director of engineering for 3D and AR, has this to say:
With NVIDIA RTX GPUs delivering dramatic performance improvements in Adobe Dimension, we're transforming design workflows with high-end visuals created faster than ever before. We're also adding interactive ray tracing that will enable artists to render fantastic 3D photorealistic scenes that take their environments to the next level.
Substance Alchemist, a tool used to create photorealistic 3D textures, is also being released by Adobe to aid 3D designers. Instead of taking hours to mask and edit lighting by hand, AI with NVIDIA RTX hardware behind it will automatically remove lighting and shadows and relight the texture in 3D. The best part? It will take a fraction of the time.
The third app, Premiere Pro, is also being boosted by AI powered with NVIDIA RTX hardware. Auto Reframe is a GPU-accelerated tool that uses Adobe Sensei AI to reframe video for varying aspect ratios. Whereas this is traditionally handled by a CPU, NVIDIA RTX GPUs should be able to boost this process by up to 400%.
New driver, new workstations
To keep up with the announcements made at Adobe MAX, there's a new Studio Driver coming from NVIDIA. It's expected to boost performance in apps like Premiere Pro, Autodesk, and Cinebench by about 12%, and it also adds support for OptiX 7 in Blender Cycles Alpha.
Finally, there are a couple of new pro workstations hitting the market from BOXX. Both are absolutely packed with performance hardware, and both come at an eye-watering price. The first, the APEXX W4L, has inside the base model an eight-core Intel Xeon W3223 processor (CPU), 96GB of DDR4-2933MHz ECC RAM, a 512GB M.2 PCIe solid-state drive (SSD), and a NVIDIA Quadro P2200 GPU with 5GB of VRAM. It retails for about $7,395, and goes even higher if you add up to a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPU and Intel Xeon W-3275 CPU with 28 cores.
The other model, the APEXX S3, is slightly more digestible, coming at a starting price of about $3,726. This baseline model comes with an eight-core Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD, and NVIDIA Quadro P2200 GPU.
Adobe Premiere Pro has been supercharged by NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Sensei AI is now 400% faster at reframing videos for varying aspect ratios.
