GPU memory allocation in After Effects

[adamneer]

I'm wondering if the changes in GPU utilization in Mavericks is causing After Effects CS6 to have less than normal discrete VRAM on application launch. Before updating, the preferences menu in AE would tell me I have (on average) about 800-900 Mb of current memory available. Now, I am getting substantially less, as low as 300 Mb on average. I have noticed the app performance when using a plugin that utilizes openGL for acceleration has gone way down as well. I realize that the plugin may need to be updated for Mavericks optimization, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm seeing less available VRAM in AE on startup.

some helpful details:
running on 2012 rMBP with 16gb ram, nvidia geforce 650m (1Gb VRAM) with up to date CUDA driver. AE has also been updated to the proper version meant to run on Mavericks.

another thing I noticed is that in system profiler, it now lists available VRAM for the integrated Intel 4000 card at 1000Mb, where before I think it was somewhere around 756Mb? Has Mavericks allocated some of my dGPU memory for use by the integrated card?

 

[adamneer]

*update*

I unchecked the option to display separate monitors as spaces in system prefs because i didn't like the menu bar taking up extra space since i'm not conditioned to make use of it on the second monitor anyway. After logging out and back in, opening After Effects and checking my VRAM, it shows I now have the amount i had before installing Mavericks - 880MB. Exactly how much VRAM is used for this new multi monitor feature in Mavericks? Or is this possibly just a huge coincidence?

 

[ToddKopriva]

As you have surmised, using an extra monitor does cause the OS to allocate extra VRAM, leaving less for After Effects.

 

[adamneer]

thanks for that, but i am not speaking about the difference i experienced from going from one monitor to 2. nothing has changed in my monitor setup from 10.8 - 2 24" monitors running from the thunderbolt ports of my rMBP. what i was referring to was the new option in OSX to treat monitors as separate spaces for Expose and menu features. This is under the Mission Control option panel in preferences and has been discussed in many threads recently because people are unhappy that the option disables screen spanning. So I decided to uncheck this option (while still maintaining my 2 monitor setup) and it did make a drastic change in my available VRAM. It was less of a difference the next time i started up AE (around 550MB) but still much more than the 300 i was seeing before. In any case, it would appear as though I'm just going to have to wait until the updates start rolling out for all of this stuff because it is obvious that Mavericks and the developers/nvidia are not yet on the same page.