AMD vs Nvidia for Video Rendering - Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,403 words · ~7 min read
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video cards they're good for you know
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anything to do with video right I mean it's it's right in the name video card
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they've got features to enhance video playback in real time they've got
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dedicated Hardware to accelerate video games and they're a necessary component
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of any system that needs to Output video to a display at all but what about video
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editing this capability has been featured prominently on the boxes of
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video cards for over a decade but do
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they actually make any bloody difference or should you just get a beefy CPU and
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Tackle your video rendering that way let's find out shall
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we the master case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your
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midtower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check
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out the l in the video description to learn more let's start with a little bit
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of background on why it is that we are doing this we make videos and one of the
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most tedious and timeconsuming processes
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that slows us down aside from our servers being broken is transcoding
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footage for faster performance in Adobe Premiere a process that you can learn
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more about here and encoding our
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finished videos using the optimal resolutions and video codecs for the
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various platforms that we publish on including YouTube vessel and billybilly
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docomo when we were developing our copor workflow that GPU usage in our
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workstations was much higher than we expected with certain workloads which is
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funny because we originally thought the GTX Titan class cards in our editing
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workstations were basically a because we can thing but something we never really
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had the time to investigate was which
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video cards are best for this process we
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just stuck with what NVIDIA had provided us back when we did our whole room water
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cooling project well now we've got an
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opportunity to answer that question for the Adobe editors out there for an
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unrelated project super micro just sent us one of their super server Sy 4028 gr-
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trt servers this freaking badass of a
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machine is going to be used in a project where we run eight gaming rigs off of a
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single box with gtx980 ti amp card from
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Zotac more to come but in the meantime
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it presented an opportunity for me and
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Ed to quickly and with relative ease
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without any physical access to the machine use on raid as a virtualization
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host and then use this thing as a remote
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test bench so Ed could shut down a Windows Virtual Machine virtually swap
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the video card to any one of the ones in here turn it back on and be ready to
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rock with a new set of bench marks this led us examine how a wide cross-section
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of different video cards on both the AMD and NVIDIA side of the fence behaved in
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our typical video encoding tasks so the
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virtual machines were set up with eight core hyperthreaded virtual processors to
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represent a high-end consumer or mid-range Zeon processor and 32 gigs of
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RAM the tests were done using the 200 gig boot SSD as a source and as a Target
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and we used actual Linus media group video projects for all the scenarios
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let's start by looking at the time it takes to export a timeline containing
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mostly cfor video clips in cfor this is
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how we would normally send the project to the final export server for
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processing into h264 and the only real conclusion that
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we can draw from this is that whether you go with AMD and therefore opencl
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acceleration or NVIDIA and therefore Cuda acceleration for your video
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workstation you're going to be getting a very similar experience just make sure
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that you do have a video card as relying
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on the CPU to do this work on its own is clearly a bad idea for the next scenario
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we're looking at something that would be more applicable to most prosumer and
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professional video editors so we're taking the 1080p cfor export from the
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first test and transcoding it to 4K
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h264 no separate encoding server
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involved our GPU usage hovered around
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30% and the advantage that our video cards enjoyed over the CPU only workflow
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diminished significantly here which might lead one to the conclusion that
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which graphics card you choose doesn't matter or even that a graphics card is
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really optional if you're exporting videos directly from your editing
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workstation except that our third test
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using chroma keed copor 4K footage and
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exporting to 1080p cinor showed us what
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we were finally looking for the scenario in which a powerful video card
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demonstrates not just better performance
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against pure CPU encoding but also
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lesser video cards so the beefiest gaming GPU in this case the
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gtx980ti in the system comes out on top
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with the Lesser cards performing about as much worse as you would expect given
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their overall horsepower and this would be applicable not just to chroma key
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green screen footage but also to any project with other effects like lumry
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color uh or warp stabilizer which leads
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us then to a really interesting final conclusion here AMD versus NVIDIA in
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this case doesn't seem to matter much the 970 and the r9290 which is about
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equivalent to its 300 series replacement are similar enough across the board that
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I I couldn't recommend one brand over the other for editing an Adobe Premiere
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with that said that might not be the case if you use other tools but the
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takeaway here then is that for video editing and Adobe Premiere you should
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get a GPU even if it's just a mainstream
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model and that much like for gaming once
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you get into the performance and Enthusiast product range you are getting
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diminishing returns for the money you spend neat
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