with

FOUNDRY’S NUKE 11.0 SUPPORTS OPENCL™ ON AMD RADEON™ PRO WX CARDSWith the introduction of Foundry Nuke 11.0, there is support for select AMD Radeon™ Pro WX cards like the powerful AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory for compute and graphics. The Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPU supplies the horsepower to do effects fast and Nuke 11.0 supports more than one card to improve speeds further.

© 2017 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Nuke is a trademark of Foundry. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple, Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group, Inc. Images modelled and textured by courtesy of Daniele Orsetti dayno.it.

3d_Artist_Foundry_Advert_V11.indd 1 13/07/2017 15:20

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FOUNDRY’S NUKE 11.0 SUPPORTS OPENCL™ ON AMD RADEON™ PRO WX CARDSWith the introduction of Foundry Nuke 11.0, there is support for select AMD Radeon™ Pro WX cards like the powerful AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory for compute and graphics. The Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPU supplies the horsepower to do effects fast and Nuke 11.0 supports more than one card to improve speeds further.

© 2017 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Nuke is a trademark of Foundry. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple, Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group, Inc. Images modelled and textured by courtesy of Daniele Orsetti dayno.it.

3d_Artist_Foundry_Advert_V11.indd 1 13/07/2017 15:20

WelcomeHigh frame rates. 8K footage.

Complex visual effects. Compositors working on

today’s movies and broadcast projects need all the computing power they can get – and with the release of Nuke 11.0, AMD is delighted to be able to help.

Thanks to Foundry’s support for OpenCL™, the open framework for GPU computing, any tool in Nuke 11.0 that makes use of your graphics card can now be accelerated by more manufacturers’ hardware, on Windows®, Linux® and Mac®.

For the first time, compositors working in Nuke can take full advantage of the power and affordable pricing of the AMD Radeon™ Pro WX Series of workstation graphics cards: cards like the Radeon™ Pro WX 7100, with

its 5.7 Tflops of peak single-precision performance. Or the dual-GPU, sub-$1,000 MSRP Radeon™ Pro Duo. Or the new Radeon™ Pro WX 9100, with its 16GB of second-generation high-bandwidth memory built next to the GPU core, offering you both blistering raw compute performance and high-speed data access.

In this special supplement, you can find out more about Nuke 11.0’s support for OpenCL, and why studios like the award-winning Jellyfish Pictures think that the technology could lead to a revolution in visual effects. We hope you enjoy it.

Rob JamiesonISV Manager, AMD

Cover image: ZERO VFX’s supernatural effects for Sony Pictures’ Ghostbusters: just one of the many blockbuster movies created with Nuke

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Nuke 11.0 Powered by OpenCL

F oundry has a long history of supporting open standards for visual effects and animation.

OpenFX, now an industry-standard API through which VFX plugins communicate with their host applications, was developed at the company in 2004. So it seems fitting that a key feature in Nuke 11.0, the latest version of its market-leading compositing, editorial and review

software, is also the support of an open technology.

Nuke 11.0 and its sister editions, NukeX 11.0 and Nuke Studio 11.0, have expanded support for OpenCL™: the leading open framework for GPU computing. Thanks to OpenCL, vital workflow tasks, from timeline playback to denoising, retiming, blurring and depth-defocusing footage, can now be accelerated by

more manufacturers’ graphics cards, no matter whether you’re working on Windows®, Linux® or Mac®.

“Just by enabling GPU support, some Nuke nodes, like ZDefocus and MotionBlur, run 200-300% faster than on the CPU alone,” says Martin Mayer, Foundry’s Head of Creative Services.

Thanks to OpenCL, compositors working on Windows or Linux workstations can now take advantage

Thanks to open standards, Nuke can now make full use of the power of more manufacturers’ GPUs, on key operating systems

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Nuke 11.0 Features at a glance

Nuke 11.0 Powered by OpenCL

Support for AMD GPUsBuilding on the existing OpenCL support for AMD GPUs inside Mac Pro workstations, GPU-accelerated features in Nuke are now supported on compatible AMD graphics cards running under Windows and Linux.

VFX Reference Platform 2017The Nuke 11.0 family has been updated to the industry-standard VFX Reference Platform 2017, including several major updates to key libraries used within Nuke, including Python, PySide, and Qt.

Live GroupsA new type of group node that opens up powerful new collaborative workflows, Live Groups referenced in scripts update automatically when a script is loaded, enabling many artists to work on a shot without the need to render intermediate stages.

Frame Server in Nuke and NukeXNuke Studio’s intelligent background rendering comes to Nuke and NukeX. By harnessing resources in your local machine, it enables you to continue working while rendering goes on in the background.

New lens distortion options in NukeXThe LensDistortion node has been revamped, with added support for fisheye and wide-angle lenses, and improved import of data from other lens estimation packages. It is now also GPU-enabled.

Timeline Disk Cache in Nuke StudioNuke Studio now has new GPU-accelerated disk caching that enables users to cache part or all of a sequence locally for smoother playback of sequences where it isn’t desirable to localise footage.

of the compute power of workstation-class GPUs in AMD’s Radeon™ Pro WX Series – like the Radeon™ Pro WX 7100, which is now supported for use with Nuke 11.0. With 5.7 Tflops of single-precision floating-point performance, a card like the Radeon Pro WX 7100 can make short work of even the most demanding of production tasks.

Unlike many consumer GPUs, the Radeon Pro WX Series cards also provide enough VRAM to help ensure that even complex visual effects and animation assets fit into graphics memory: the Radeon Pro WX 7100 features 8GB of GDDR5 memory to ensure seamless performance.

“Cara VR, Nuke’s plugin toolset for virtual reality work, can easily handle input from 16 4K cameras – and that’s a lot of pixels to process,” points out Mayer. “All that data needs to be stored somewhere.”

But it isn’t just Nuke’s existing tools that benefit from workstation-class graphics cards: two of the key features in Nuke 11.0 also make use of GPU acceleration. NukeX’s revamped LensDistortion node – which now supports fisheye and wide-angle lenses – makes use of the GPU for lens correction; while Nuke Studio’s Timeline Disk Cache enables users to cache part or all of a sequence locally for smoother playback.

Throw in features like the new Live Groups system, which makes it easier for artists to collaborate on shots, and support for industry standards like VFX Reference Platform 2017, a set of key open-source file formats and graphics libraries also used by other visual effects tools, and Nuke 11.0 is a powerful, forward-looking – and, above all, open – solution to today’s most demanding compositing and visual effects challenges.

“Working with standards that everybody can access propels technology forwards,” concludes Martin Mayer. “Everyone in the industry benefits.”

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Jellyfish PicturesFor the award-winning UK studio, Nuke 11.0’s support for open standards like OpenCL™ could lead to a revolution in visual effects

V isual effects is a fast-moving industry, particularly for a studio that wants to stay on

top of its game. So when Jeremy Smith, CTO of the UK’s multi-award-winning Jellyfish Pictures, is asked to name his favourite feature in Nuke 11.0, he doesn’t hesitate. “Support for OpenCL,” he says. “It’s good to be able to try software that supports open standards across the industry.”

Founded in 2001 as a “two-man band”, Jellyfish is now one of the

world’s leading VFX and animation studios, employing nearly 200 staff. It won a BAFTA for its work on BBC documentary series Fight for Life, and an award for PBS special Your Inner Fish. Its recent film work includes last year’s highest-grossing movie: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, on which Jellyfish completed 150 effects shots.

The studio uses a range of software in production, including 3D applications Maya, Houdini, Softimage and Cinema 4D, plus the V-Ray, Arnold and Redshift renderers. But when it

comes to movie compositing, there’s only one game in town.

“For 2D image processing, Nuke is king,” says Smith. “It’s extensible. Its API means you can integrate it into your current production pipeline. And its support for industry-standard codecs is very good.”

While Nuke 11.0 offers compositors a range of powerful new tools – you can read more about them on the previous page – for Smith, a key selling point is its continued support for open standards like OpenCL. Through

CASE STUDY

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Main image: Jellyfish Pictures contributed over 150 VFX shots to last year’s box-office-topping Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

This page: The studio’s other recent projects include cult UK science-fiction satire Black Mirror and upcoming CG animated series Dennis and Gnasher: Unleashed

Foundry’s adoption of this open framework for GPU computing, critical tasks like denoising, motion blurring or depth-defocusing footage can now be accelerated by any manufacturer’s graphics cards.

“Denoising is computationally very intense,” points out Smith. “It takes a lot of CPU time. If you can offload those calculations to a GPU, your workload is cut by 10 to 15 times.”

Jellyfish is currently trialling AMD’s professional graphics cards with a view to using them in key bespoke workstations for designated roles. Cards in the AMD Radeon™ Pro WX Series undergo a rigorous certification process to test their readiness for use

with visual effects software like Maya and Houdini, and offer powerful GPU compute performance.

But for Smith, another key factor for choosing GPUs for use in production is memory. The more VRAM a card has, the larger and more complex the assets that can be fitted into graphics memory, whether for compositing, rendering, or critical visual effects tasks like simulation.

“If you’re doing heavy simulations, the potential to do all of that work on one card and not run out of memory is absolutely phenomenal,” he says.

And with AMD continuing to push boundaries through cards like the upcoming ‘Vega’ architecture-based

Radeon™ Pro SSG, which will feature 2TB of solid state graphics memory, Smith is optimistic about the power of GPU computing to further transform VFX – particularly its potential to make tasks that were previously only possible on expensive, vendor-specific turnkey finishing systems achievable using affordable workstation graphics cards and open desktop compositing software like Nuke 11.0.

“Imagine doing denoising or simulation on a card with 2TB of VRAM,” he says. “My laptop doesn’t have that much real RAM in it! If you could do everything on one or two graphics cards in a high-end PC, it would really change the game.”

“WHEN IT COMES TO2D IMAGE PROCESSING,

NUKE IS KING”

FOUNDRY’S NUKE 11.0 SUPPORTS OPENCL™ ON AMD RADEON™ PRO WX CARDS

© 2017 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Nuke is a trademark of Foundry. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple, Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group, Inc. Images modelled and textured by courtesy of Daniele Orsetti dayno.it.

With the introduction of Foundry Nuke 11.0, there is support for select AMD Radeon™ Pro WX cards like the powerful AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory for compute and graphics. The Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 GPU supplies the horsepower to do effects fast and Nuke 11.0 supports more than one card to improve speeds further.

3d_Artist_Foundry_Advert_V11.indd 2 13/07/2017 15:20