Adobe Switches On Native Support For AMD’s Radeon Pro SSG In Premiere Pro CC

After two years of being talked about, showcased, developed, and in a way, finding a market, AMD’s Radeon Pro SSG will soon get its first official show of support in the media and entertainment workhorse, Adobe Premiere Pro, as part of the new Creative Cloud update that’s being rolled out.

The Radeon Pro SSG is something we’ve touched on over the course of the last couple of years, first showcased at SIGGRAPH 2016. It’s a hybrid solution that attached a large chunk of solid-state NAND flash right onto the GPU for rapid access, as an extension to the High Bandwidth Cache (HBC), creating the ‘Solid State Graphics’ card, or SSG. This cache is then used to store very large datasets, such as raw 8K footage, so that it doesn’t have to loop back through the CPU and storage controller to an external SSD.

HBC is something that was brought to light in more detail last year, with the roll-out of the Vega GPUs. It works very much in similar ways as to shared memory, allowing a GPU to access system memory as a high-latency extension to its own memory, effectively allowing it to work on large chunks of data that wouldn’t normally be possible with just the internal VRAM. In games, that saw very limited use, since they’re built around limited memory pools already, but for workstations, it could prove invaluable. Using NAND Flash as a second source of cache extends this further to allow real-time filtering and correction of RAW 8K video footage.

The SSG evolved a bit from the original announcement, as the 1TB SSD was replaced with 2TB of NVMe, and the RX 480 core swapped out for a much improved Vega chip, in effect making the SSG a WX 9100 with 2TB SSD bolted on. The SSG was on demo at the SIGGRAPH event as part of a blind comparison, running Adobe Premiere Pro with 8K video and a number of filters enabled.

Today marks the official announcement of the partnership with Adobe to enable native support of the SSG in Premiere Pro CC as a part of the CC update – meaning the SSG is now ready for some real work beyond tech demos. One of the most important aspects about this launch is the inclusion of native RAW camera format decoding by the SSG, including ARRI AMIRA, Canon XF and RAW, Panasonic AVC and P2, REDCODE RAW, and Sony XDCAM and XAVC.

Part of this push is to remove a number of pre-production aspects of the video editing workflow, namely removing the need to downsample or use proxy formats for faster editing, effectively removing downtime going from camera to editor. It also allows for various filters and effects to be used live without processing the footage first, while also reducing CPU and memory loads on the system. If 8K editing isn’t needed, then the SSG will happily work with multiple 4K or 2K streams simultaneously as well.

This update is part of Adobe’s showcase at the NAB trade show, where a number of other additions to Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud packages are being shown, such as broader VR support, 360 video editing, automatic color matching and various rapid effect processes in After Effects.