Adobe Creative Cloud Video Editing Apps Now Benefit From eGPU

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(The OWC Helios FX Thunderbolt 3 Expansion Chassis and AMD Radeon 580 GPU) — **(The OWC Helios FX Thunderbolt 3 Expansion Chassis and AMD Radeon 580 GPU.)**

At the recent NAB 2019 trade show, Adobe announced that newly-released versions of Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Media Encoder can use Thunderbolt 3 external Graphics Processing Units (eGPUs) to speed processor-intensive video editing work. Previous versions of these Adobe Creative Cloud apps didn’t take full advantage of an eGPU attached to a Mac, but the updates — announced on April 3, 2019 — now enable the apps to perform tasks such as exporting video in less than half the time required without the assistance of an eGPU.

In the announcement, AMD senior manager of developer relations/professional graphics Richard Callery noted that a combination of an eGPU chassis, Adobe CC apps, and AMD technologies “enables content creators to effectively cut their ProRes 422 4K, H.264 export times by more than half.” While these results were for a chassis powered by the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 eGPU, other NAB 2019 exhibitors noted that the less-expensive AMD RX570 chipset provided meaningful acceleration as well.

MacSales.com sells the OWC Mercury Helios FX eGPU chassis with either 550W or 650W power supplies, and in bundles with the AMD RX580 GPU card. The AMD RX580 has 8GB of fast GDDR5 RAM, 36 compute units, and up to 6.2 teraflops (that’s 6.2 trillion floating point operations per second!) of performance. With that kind of power, video and AR/VR software performance is accelerated so you have shorter rendering times and faster effects operations not only with the updated Adobe Creative Cloud apps, but also with Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid and other video suites.

The Mercury Helios FX pumps out up to 87W of power to keep your Thunderbolt 3 MacBook happy, and you’ll be able to drive multiple monitors with the AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU card plugged in. The card supports DisplayPort 1.4 with up to 4096 x 2160 resolution per display (three ports), dual-link DVI at up to 2560 x 1600 maximum resolution, and HDMI 2.0b at a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160.