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by PStamatiou 3072 days ago
Premiere Pro definitely takes advantage of GPU and CPU very efficiently. Lightroom does not - which is why instead of going for some 18 core i9 7980XE build where it has more cores but a much lower clock per core, i opted for just 6 cores but with a very high clock.
3 comments

I don't think that Premier does really take advantage of video cards. I saw a video where they had switched a really old GTX 660 vs a 1080ti and the render time was not changed between them.
I did a bench of the Premiere Pro h264 benchmark ("PPBM") with CUDA acceleration and without (software): the difference was 7m 4sec without GPU and 48 seconds with GPU.
Sorry, I should have phrased it better, you don't have to have the latest and greatest video card for Premiere. But, yes, you are correct, having GPU acceleration does work.
It's possible the operation bandwidth limited in which case at some point a faster card won't speed it up any more. But gpu acceleration vs software is an enormous difference in premiere
In our workload this is definitely the case. When on the GPU the processing is almost infinitely quick. It's the transfer to and from the GPU memory which takes the time. This might be the case in the parent post.

There was a guy who managed to go directly from the SATA controller to GPU memory by modifying the Linux kernel for some postgres database queries and got massive speedup. Would love it if that sort of optimization could be more readily available.

Seems a bit short sighted of the lightroom developers high end mac users have been worried about Apples ignoring of the high end for years now.

Ryzen and Threadripper is supposed to be a beast for content creation that can use a lot of cores

I recall reading in SoS (sound on Sound) years ago that the big name recoding studios where worried about this back then.

It doesn't feel like it uses my AMD card at all. Whenever I check taskmanager it's always using CPU, even when rendering. Don't know if it just doesn't support AMD cards, but I'm not sure what would help increase it's performance aside from RAM now.
Actual encoding for renders is all CPU based: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2122549

Personally, I use DaVinci Resolve, but the results are largely the same, with exports being largely entirely CPU dependent: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-1...

Looks like Puget Systems does a lot of performance shootouts, including some Premiere ones: https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

Philip Bloom recently did a writeup of his switch from a Mac to a PC for his editing machine (yes, it's definitely a trend, unless you are a FCP diehard or doing audio production, the Mac is sadly done as a content production platform): http://philipbloom.net/blog/makingtheswitch/

Will be interesting if they revisit some of the shootouts post-meltdown/spectre patching...