Polaris vs Pascal for Video Editing/Adobe Premiere Pro CC

[Headfoot]

I'd spend a little time looking into reliability of your SSDs if this a work computer. I've stopped purchasing Samsung SSDs myself because every one I've ever bought has failed. 1 SSD 830, 2 SSD 840 Evos. Which is a shame considering how fast they are.

Either that or i'd invest in enough to be able to RAID 1 unless you're comfortable with your offline backup process and ok with perhaps losing some work in progress.

 

[2blzd]

I'd spend a little time looking into reliability of your SSDs if this a work computer. I've stopped purchasing Samsung SSDs myself because every one I've ever bought has failed. 1 SSD 830, 2 SSD 840 Evos. Which is a shame considering how fast they are.

Either that or i'd invest in enough to be able to RAID 1 unless you're comfortable with your offline backup process and ok with perhaps losing some work in progress.

I haven't had any issues with my Samsung SSD's. My disk setup mirrors that of a colleague's editing machine that I helped put together that runs really nice. No issues thus far but I will keep that in mind. Thanks

You really think 1070 will provide 2x the rendering speed of the 480?

you care way too much about other people

 

[Bacon1]

I haven't had any issues with my Samsung SSD's. My disk setup mirrors that of a colleague's editing machine that I helped put together that runs really nice. No issues thus far but I will keep that in mind. Thanks



you care way too much about other people

You didn't answer my question. What is the point of this thread? You were asking for "input", but ignore all of it and are buying your perferred card anyway.

 

[2blzd]

You didn't answer my question. What is the point of this thread? You were asking for "input", but ignore all of it and are buying your perferred card anyway.

move along troll.

I got a ton of great info, thanks

 

[Bacon1]

move along troll.

I got a ton of great info, thanks

I'm not trolling, you are.

That great info showed that OpenCL was just as good and AMD cards were just as good.

Like my post said, is the 1070 going to provide 2x the rendering speed of 480? You are paying 2x the price for it.

 

[2blzd]

What other software do you use? CUDA is generally more supported than OpenCL, but the latter is catching up. Keep in mind that while you cannot run CUDA workloads with an AMD card, you can still run OpenCL workloads with a NVIDIA card. Depending of the application used, some acceleration is better than no acceleration at all. That is probably why everyone from the Adobe community recommends CUDA over OpenCL most of the time.

That being said, there is little difference in performance between a cheap GTX 960 vs a Titan class card for Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is so poorly optimized for GPU acceleration. GPU acceleration is only used when applying effects such as stabilizer or color correction. You will be better served by saving your money with a cheap RX480 and spending it on a beefy 6+ cores CPU.

Alternatively, if you are worried about speed and video editing is your livelihood, you could take a look at Final Cut X. Apple's implementation of GPU acceleration is miles ahead of Adobe's and allows for real time editing of 4k videos (something Premiere cannot achieve even on the beefiest rigs). I recon FCX is 400% to 600% faster than Premiere if you are willing to make the jump to the Apple platform.

Sorry, most of this is information from 2014. OpenCL is widely supported across all effects. It took time, but it's there now. Today, Fury X is the most stable and fastest card for the latest Premiere Pro released last week. You are right that most workloads are CPU driven and hence don't show off the GPU's potential. But drop in a heavy sequence - we are talking 8K on a light codec with a whole bunch of effects, and Fury X shows its might, outperforming even Quadro M6000. (Haven't tested 1080 yet)

Premiere Pro uses GPU acceleration extensively, everything from scaling, colour management transforms to exports. For exports, it even uses multi GPUs. How much your system is CPU limited is determined by the source format used. That is because decoding is almost always CPU bound.

So, if you are reading 6K R3D RED RAW files, it doesn't matter - you will be CPU bound till you have a 20-core system. If you are reading 4K XAVC or XF-AVC files from cameras like Sony F5 or C300 Mk II, you will be CPU bound till a 6-core system. Some codecs are storage I/O bound too. Such as ARRIRAW or F65RAW. These are uncompressed codecs with GPU accelerated debayer, so the CPU doesn't do much work. But you need a SSD or fast RAID0 subsystem to eliminate the bottleneck as they draw to the tune of 300 MB/s. Finally, we have mezzanine codecs like DNxHR, Cineform and ProRes. You can run 8K easily, little stress on CPU or I/O. Here the sequence become GPU limited as the GPU has to work to scale down the 8K to your sequence and display.

It's completely false that you can't edit 4K on Premiere Pro. We have finished multiple 6K RED Epic / Weapon projects. This is the most popular camera being used. Like I said above, with a light codec, 8K is pretty easy on Premiere Pro with a mid-range system. Check out Devin Super Tramp - he has multiple videos showing off his workflow - a lot of 6K footage finished at 4K. On a Mac with AMD graphics cards, by the way.

Finally, Final Cut Pro X is a massive improvement on the archaic FCP 7. But to say it's much faster than Premiere Pro is a myth propagated by Apple fanboys. For CPU limited decode, it's up to par with Premiere Pro but no faster. However, for scaling operations, such as using 6K footage in a 2K sequence and so on, Premiere Pro's GPU acceleration is much faster. It's not FCP X's fault, it's probably a case of graphics card drivers being much more mature on Windows than macOS. FCP X's only major performance advantage was the background transcoding, but that has now been mitigated by Premiere Pro's new Ingest features. Right now, the only thing FCP X does faster is colour correction and stabilisation, but Adobe's Warp stabiliser still produces better results and the Lumetri colour engine is far more sophisiticated.

Having said all of that, you can get significantly faster exports out of FCP X. But there's a bit of a trick with how it works. You see, unlike Premiere Pro which reads files natively, FCP X has a rendering engine, which renders file as an intermediate before displaying it. So if you are just editing and exporting, FCP X is indeed much faster, because it simply accesses the low overhead render files. (at the cost of lower quality) You can of course pre-render in Premiere Pro as well, but it isn't persistent like FCP X.

At the end of it, everyone's going to get different results based on what you are going to do exactly.

So, it's prudent to optimise your system according to your workload.

Premiere Pro has taken advantage of multiple GPUs for a while now. But only for exports (i.e. not while editing) and it makes a significant difference only if the bottleneck is GPU(s). In most cases, you are not going to saturate a single GPU and thus a second GPU won't make much difference. But again, like I said, it depends on your exact usage, etc.

thanks for all the great info to help me make a decision!

 

[PhonakV30]

saying Polaris is a dud , It's kind of troll.then Why are you here? People don't like troll.

 

[AkumaX]

Premiere Pro has taken advantage of multiple GPUs for a while now. But only for exports (i.e. not while editing) and it makes a significant difference only if the bottleneck is GPU(s). In most cases, you are not going to saturate a single GPU and thus a second GPU won't make much difference. But again, like I said, it depends on your exact usage, etc.

Just read a couple of your replies. Thanks for your input!

I do have a question though, exactly how much Disk I/O limited is Premiere Pro? Would a single fast 6TB HDD (~180MB/s write) suffice? Or would RAID0 be required? If so, I'd rather be tempted to get a 1TB SSD (500MB/s write), or possibly 2 x 500GB in RAID0. As an example, let's say you had a 6-core i7-6800K system + 1070/1080 (32GB RAM? 64GB make a difference?) Thanks!

 

[zentan]

saying Polaris is a dud , It's kind of troll.then Why are you here? People don't like troll.

Really? We did see lot of people calling similar and lot worse to 1070/1080 and some of it was quite deserved at least for the 100/80$ reference blower price stunt but did we see such silly complains then?
The OP clearly clarified he also intends to game well on 1440p for what little amount he can use it for. You and me can give our points and argue but at the end of the day it's for him to decide and considering he was a member here for near about 10 years(before he was needlessly permabanned) and accounting his posts in CPU section he is pretty much above average to decide for himself after taking all points into account.
There's absolutely no need to get so serious that even calling a card "dud" is considered trolling which actually many would consider it from a pure technical point of view even if it is presently the King of mainstream performance.

 

[2blzd]

Just read a couple of your replies. Thanks for your input!

I do have a question though, exactly how much Disk I/O limited is Premiere Pro? Would a single fast 6TB HDD (~180MB/s write) suffice? Or would RAID0 be required? If so, I'd rather be tempted to get a 1TB SSD (500MB/s write), or possibly 2 x 500GB in RAID0. As an example, let's say you had a 6-core i7-6800K system + 1070/1080 (32GB RAM? 64GB make a difference?) Thanks!

You want as many separate drives for Premiere Pro as you can afford. You want the IN and OUT seperate. Here is a fantastic guide:

1. Media cache & Media cache database files, created on importing media into a project. They contain indexed, conformed audio and peak files for waveform display.
   Typically small files, but lots of them, so in the end they still occupy lots of disk space.
2. Preview (rendered) files, created when the time-line is rendered for preview purposes, the red bar turned to green. Read all the time when previewing the time-line.
3. Project files, including project auto-save files, that are constantly being read and saved as auto-save files and written when saving your edits.
4. Media files, the original video material ingested from tape or card based cameras. Typically long files, only used for reading, since PR is a non-destructive editor.
5. Export files, created when the time-line is exported to its final delivery format. These files are typically only written once and often vary in size from several hundred KB to tens of GB.

 

[AkumaX]

You want as many separate drives for Premiere Pro as you can afford. You want the IN and OUT seperate. Here is a fantastic guide:

Cool, thanks! It sounds like it's not as I/O limited as I expected.

Say I do 4 drives:

* C : (OS) - 500GB SSD
* D : (Media) - 500GB SSD (or 2TB HDD?)
* E : (Cache) - Definitely SSD
* F : (Export) - 500GB SSD (or 2TB HDD?)

Not sure if the Read speed on D drive with HDDs are OK, or if I do need SSD for Media work? Same question with Export (Write speed)

 

[krumme]

thanks for all the great info to help me make a decision!

Ok. So you get the answer "Fury X is the most stable and fastest card for the latest Premiere Pro released last week"
Yet you chose an unstable (you say you have seen report of that) slower card. I dont understand it. Seems unserious to me and disrespectfull of the advice you were given from a question you pose yourself. Why not buy a eg Nano?
Do you use it for professional work?

I was reading this thread with interest because we do a little video editing and time for rendering is well man hrs and cost. I am not doing the stuff myself by i think its sony vegas and then a small program for compressing the stuff extra. I certainly know stability is king. Then time.

I am not going to decide what to do. The video editor can certainly do that himself but i damn sure expect him to follow solid advice. Nothing as great as that.

 

[jfp555]

Sorry, most of this is information from 2014. OpenCL is widely supported across all effects. It took time, but it's there now. Today, Fury X is the most stable and fastest card for the latest Premiere Pro released last week. You are right that most workloads are CPU driven and hence don't show off the GPU's potential. But drop in a heavy sequence - we are talking 8K on a light codec with a whole bunch of effects, and Fury X shows its might, outperforming even Quadro M6000. (Haven't tested 1080 yet)

Premiere Pro uses GPU acceleration extensively, everything from scaling, colour management transforms to exports. For exports, it even uses multi GPUs. How much your system is CPU limited is determined by the source format used. That is because decoding is almost always CPU bound.

So, if you are reading 6K R3D RED RAW files, it doesn't matter - you will be CPU bound till you have a 20-core system. If you are reading 4K XAVC or XF-AVC files from cameras like Sony F5 or C300 Mk II, you will be CPU bound till a 6-core system. Some codecs are storage I/O bound too. Such as ARRIRAW or F65RAW. These are uncompressed codecs with GPU accelerated debayer, so the CPU doesn't do much work. But you need a SSD or fast RAID0 subsystem to eliminate the bottleneck as they draw to the tune of 300 MB/s. Finally, we have mezzanine codecs like DNxHR, Cineform and ProRes. You can run 8K easily, little stress on CPU or I/O. Here the sequence become GPU limited as the GPU has to work to scale down the 8K to your sequence and display.

It's completely false that you can't edit 4K on Premiere Pro. We have finished multiple 6K RED Epic / Weapon projects. This is the most popular camera being used. Like I said above, with a light codec, 8K is pretty easy on Premiere Pro with a mid-range system. Check out Devin Super Tramp - he has multiple videos showing off his workflow - a lot of 6K footage finished at 4K. On a Mac with AMD graphics cards, by the way.

Finally, Final Cut Pro X is a massive improvement on the archaic FCP 7. But to say it's much faster than Premiere Pro is a myth propagated by Apple fanboys. For CPU limited decode, it's up to par with Premiere Pro but no faster. However, for scaling operations, such as using 6K footage in a 2K sequence and so on, Premiere Pro's GPU acceleration is much faster. It's not FCP X's fault, it's probably a case of graphics card drivers being much more mature on Windows than macOS. FCP X's only major performance advantage was the background transcoding, but that has now been mitigated by Premiere Pro's new Ingest features. Right now, the only thing FCP X does faster is colour correction and stabilisation, but Adobe's Warp stabiliser still produces better results and the Lumetri colour engine is far more sophisiticated.

Having said all of that, you can get significantly faster exports out of FCP X. But there's a bit of a trick with how it works. You see, unlike Premiere Pro which reads files natively, FCP X has a rendering engine, which renders file as an intermediate before displaying it. So if you are just editing and exporting, FCP X is indeed much faster, because it simply accesses the low overhead render files. (at the cost of lower quality) You can of course pre-render in Premiere Pro as well, but it isn't persistent like FCP X.

At the end of it, everyone's going to get different results based on what you are going to do exactly.

So, it's prudent to optimise your system according to your workload.

Hey, thanks for this incredibly helpful post. Can you please check out my thread where I'm trying to pick out the best bang for buck system for a system focused on editing/post of varied footage from low/mid range cameras (nothing 8k or 6k atm).

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2480035

 

[jfp555]

Sorry, most of this is information from 2014. OpenCL is widely supported across all effects. It took time, but it's there now. Today, Fury X is the most stable and fastest card for the latest Premiere Pro released last week. You are right that most workloads are CPU driven and hence don't show off the GPU's potential. But drop in a heavy sequence - we are talking 8K on a light codec with a whole bunch of effects, and Fury X shows its might, outperforming even Quadro M6000. (Haven't tested 1080 yet)

Premiere Pro uses GPU acceleration extensively, everything from scaling, colour management transforms to exports. For exports, it even uses multi GPUs. How much your system is CPU limited is determined by the source format used. That is because decoding is almost always CPU bound.

So, if you are reading 6K R3D RED RAW files, it doesn't matter - you will be CPU bound till you have a 20-core system. If you are reading 4K XAVC or XF-AVC files from cameras like Sony F5 or C300 Mk II, you will be CPU bound till a 6-core system. Some codecs are storage I/O bound too. Such as ARRIRAW or F65RAW. These are uncompressed codecs with GPU accelerated debayer, so the CPU doesn't do much work. But you need a SSD or fast RAID0 subsystem to eliminate the bottleneck as they draw to the tune of 300 MB/s. Finally, we have mezzanine codecs like DNxHR, Cineform and ProRes. You can run 8K easily, little stress on CPU or I/O. Here the sequence become GPU limited as the GPU has to work to scale down the 8K to your sequence and display.

It's completely false that you can't edit 4K on Premiere Pro. We have finished multiple 6K RED Epic / Weapon projects. This is the most popular camera being used. Like I said above, with a light codec, 8K is pretty easy on Premiere Pro with a mid-range system. Check out Devin Super Tramp - he has multiple videos showing off his workflow - a lot of 6K footage finished at 4K. On a Mac with AMD graphics cards, by the way.

Finally, Final Cut Pro X is a massive improvement on the archaic FCP 7. But to say it's much faster than Premiere Pro is a myth propagated by Apple fanboys. For CPU limited decode, it's up to par with Premiere Pro but no faster. However, for scaling operations, such as using 6K footage in a 2K sequence and so on, Premiere Pro's GPU acceleration is much faster. It's not FCP X's fault, it's probably a case of graphics card drivers being much more mature on Windows than macOS. FCP X's only major performance advantage was the background transcoding, but that has now been mitigated by Premiere Pro's new Ingest features. Right now, the only thing FCP X does faster is colour correction and stabilisation, but Adobe's Warp stabiliser still produces better results and the Lumetri colour engine is far more sophisiticated.

Having said all of that, you can get significantly faster exports out of FCP X. But there's a bit of a trick with how it works. You see, unlike Premiere Pro which reads files natively, FCP X has a rendering engine, which renders file as an intermediate before displaying it. So if you are just editing and exporting, FCP X is indeed much faster, because it simply accesses the low overhead render files. (at the cost of lower quality) You can of course pre-render in Premiere Pro as well, but it isn't persistent like FCP X.

At the end of it, everyone's going to get different results based on what you are going to do exactly.

So, it's prudent to optimise your system according to your workload.

I tried to PM you but I can't yet due to the lack of posts.

Please help me resolve this dilemma I'm in, I read your post here and found it to be one of the most informative and up to date ones regarding editing hardware and software.

I'm looking to build a versatile and scalable editing rig. Currently I'm working with lots of DSLR/GO Pro footage but the intention is to be able to deal with higher res and bitrate assets later on.

Currently I'm considering:

- A dual xeon 2670 v1 sandy bridge machine. These are the recently decommissioned server chips flooding the market though motherboards are obscenely expensive at the moment.

- A haswell gen E5 (ES-engineering sample) CPU that I can keep turbo'ed or overclocked so I can end up with a machine that gives close to 5960x performance for around 60 to 70% of the cost. This way I also get a modern platfom rather than the ageing one I will be stuck with in the dual xeon.

- A super cheap AMD 8320e (slow 8 core can be OC'd very easily) and a nice GPU to keep my workflow as GPU centric as possible.

I would greatly appreciate your input. Thanks!

 

[trane]

DSLR / GoPro footage isn't that heavy at all. If I were you I'd get a Core i7 6700K with RX 480. Should chew through GoPro footage just fine. FX 8320 will probably be a tad too slow.

 

[jfp555]

DSLR / GoPro footage isn't that heavy at all. If I were you I'd get a Core i7 6700K with RX 480. Should chew through GoPro footage just fine. FX 8320 will probably be a tad too slow.

I've become used to chucking footage on the timeline and not worrying about it in Adobe. I've become tired of editing on a laptop with monitors/drives attached and was wanting to build a desktop.

Was just interested in building an editing rig that would allow me to edit the widest variety of formats without transcoding footage yet stay with reasonable specs (i.e. no $4000 20 core count dual xeons)