Best performance hardware with Adobe CS6

[Olivier Madar]

Hi,

It is not so easy to know what the best hardware config is for CS6, and I don't think they are any test available for benchmarking the adobe Premiere CS6 workflow.

So, I will put here my different tests on different computer (Mac, PC, notebook, etc...). Of course, it is not very scientific, but could be useful.

Todays test :

CS6 is able to use the AMD graphic card on Macbook Pro i7 17. OK, i first installed Premiere CS6 on my macbook pro with snow leopard, so no mercury playback engine but no mercury playback engine.

i have been very happy for the last 2 weeks editing directly R3D 4K Hd on my macbook, even without the Mercury playback. I wanted to see if the Mercury playback engine was useful for the final rendering. So, here is my test :

Macbook Pro 17 i7, 2,3 GHz, 8G RAM, syst 10.6.8 (snow leopard) :
9 minutes of R3D on the timeline, rendered in 1080 in the Adobe format preset (check the little box in the rendering screen) --> 30 minutes

Idem under Lion (10.7.3) with the same time line --> 30 minutes

So, the AMD card is not useful for final rendering (not very surprising)


Olivier

 

[joshua csehak]

This is very useful. I'd especially like to see what kind of performance people are getting from their graphics cards. I've got an AMD radeon 4870 (neither CUDA nor OpenCL) in a nehalem (IIRC) Mac Pro and Premiere loads an .r3d file no problem, and plays it a bit choppily at 1/2 res, and perfectly smoothly at 1/4 res. If anyone's getting much better performance from a gtx 285 or a 5870, or blazing fast (to justify $700-1000) performance from a quadro 4000 or 4800, that'd be useful to know.

 

[Tom Daigon]

Im getting great performance from the Quadro 4000 on my system.
Early Mac Pro 2008 3,1
2 - 3.4 Xeons
24 GB ram
Quadro 4000
Maxx Digital raid array (750MB/sec.)
Lion 10.7.4

 

[PatrickFaith]

CS6 now supports Keppler (i.e. nvidea 680 and 690 ) ... that looks like a hot ticket if u do the fancier composites for AE. My casual tests on Premiere between two systems, is telling me it mainly is effected by how much and how fast my SSD is(i.e. my system with a lot of fast SSD seemed way faster then a comparable system with only 20 gig of the old ssd).

 

[Ryan Browne]

Does anyone know if the 600 series nvidia cards have a huge advantage over the 500 series? Or is it just another step of improvements?

 

[Joseph Coleman]

+1 on the 600 vs 500 series, I heard some negative feedback on the 600 series and would love to know how well cs6 utilizes the new gpu tech

 

[Manuel López Pérez]

CS6 now supports Keppler (i.e. nvidea 680 and 690 ) ...

I think is only for After Effects, this is write in AE Adobe blog: "The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 (a new Kepler-class GPU) can now be used for GPU acceleration of the ray-traced 3D renderer on Windows."

 

[Olivier Madar]

Just tested this morning the improved performance with AMD graphic card of my macbook pro and CS 6 :
Now, i read 1080 timeline of R3D in reel time with 4K HD at 1/2 (it was 1/4 before going to Lion), and with a 4K HD timeline and 4K HD R3D, I read at 1/4 (maybe it is the same effort for the computer).
But what is great, is to use the ultrakey in Real time !!!! Incredible ! 4K HD in 1080 timeline key in reel time !!

I also tested the warp stabilizer that should be improuved by the card : it is but no very much like ultrakey.

the new three way color correction is amazing !!! I can change all parameter and read the timeline and make a calculation for warp in the same time !! )) So funny !!

I don't want anymore to think about prores, and co workflow. I am so happy NOW with my 1 year old macbook pro... It is more easy to edit R3D than AVCHD from my GH2. I will sell them all now (I have 4), it is more easy to use scarlett.

Thank you Adobe and Red !!!!

 

[Olivier Madar]

Just tested this morning the improved performance with AMD graphic card of my macbook pro and CS 6 :


I also tested the warp stabilizer that should be improuved by the card : it is but no very much like ultrakey.

In fact, it is more accelerated than i thought. Only 4 cores of 8 are running, and i can do what i want during the calculation in the background, and the speed is like x2 or x3, so... not so bad !

 

[Todd Kopriva]

Only a part of the Warp Stabilizer effect is GPU-accelerated: just the distortion phase, not the analysis phase (which is the very time-consuming part).