GPU Encoding Performance Worth It?

The trouble is, that HP system is not much, if any, improvement over your current system. That's because all of HP's gaming desktops do not have video outs at all on the motherboard, and there is absolutely no provision at all whatsoever to enable the integrated Intel graphics even if the CPU itself has it. What's more, HP's more home-office-oriented desktops have motherboard video out ports that get semi-permanently-disabled whenever a discrete GPU is installed, with absolutely no provision whatsoever to force-enable the iGPU. In other words, the way HP designed its gaming PCs at both hardware and firmware level that they might as well have used only the F-series CPUs in them.

And what HP did to all of its gaming desktops is EXACTLY the same thing that Gigabyte did to all of its X-series motherboards during the Z68 chipset days of Sandy Bridge: None of Gigabyte's X-series Z68 boards had any video outs at all on the motherboard panel, and thus the IGP (and therefore QuickSync) had been semi-permanently disabled on all CPUs that were installed on such motherboards, effectively making them nothing more than glorified P67 chipset-based motherboards. What Gigabyte failed to foresee, however, was that gaming systems with higher-end motherboards often made better video editing systems than cheapo systems with budget motherboards did and that the IGP could further accelerate certain video editing functions, so Gigabyte at the time relegated IGP/QuickSync/video-out capability to its lower-end Z68 motherboards. Gigabyte later rectified that situation partially with the introduction of the XP-series line of Z68 boards - but one would have needed an HDMI-equipped monitor just to even utilize the CPU's IGP for display (although these XP boards' BIOSes included a provision to force-enable the IGP whenever needed). At the time, most consumer computer monitors that were in use only had VGA or DVI-D capability, and thus could not connect to these XP-series boards at all. There is, however, one thing that Gigabyte did right when it introduced those XP-series Z68 motherboards: It correctly foresaw the time when HDMI and/or DisplayPort would become the new standard for PC monitor connections. Accordingly, none of today's higher-end discrete graphics cards come with VGA or DVI ports at all whatsoever, and using such an old or legacy monitor would now require an active whatever-to-DisplayPort converter just to even use such a monitor at all.

Another misstep that Gigabyte made during the LGA 1155 days is that it stuck to a legacy Phoenix/Award BIOS for a couple of years after most of its major motherboard competitors had adopted a UEFI BIOS from AMI (American Megatrends), which was then customized to the specifications of a given motherboard manufacturer. Gigabyte did implement a proprietary TouchBios - but that software only worked in Windows Vista or Windows 7, and it only worked with a legacy Award BIOS. Some of these originally Award BIOS-equipped Gigabyte motherboards got beta UEFI AMI BIOSes, but Gigabyte offered no official method of reverting back to Award if something went wrong with the BIOS update process or if the updated UEFI BIOS failed to work well. It wasn't until the Z77 era when Gigabyte finally adopted UEFI as standard.

And I cannot find the exact HP gaming system that you mentioned from Amazon. I checked all of the options priced between $600 and $800, only to find that every single one of those systems use older-generation CPUs (8th-Generation or even 7th-Generation Intel Core) and older-generation GPUs (Pascal or even Maxwell). In fact, all of HP's gaming systems on Amazon that have exactly the same specs as your current system all cost well over $900.

In other words, all HP gaming systems priced around the $700 price point that are currently available are a bit outdated: While the GeForce 10 series and earlier GPUs do beat their AMD Radeon contemporaries at 1080p video processing, they choke badly under pressure at 4k, to the point that same-age Radeons equal or beat those older GeForces at that resolution. And there is where the driver priorities diverge for both Nvidia and AMD: Whereas Nvidia has optimized newer drivers for current-gen GPUs but more or less neglect older ones, AMD kept on tweaking its newer drivers for older GPUs but leaves too many bugs unresolved when such drivers are used with newer parts.

In other words, a current-generation 6-core HP gaming system that performs no better overall than a four-year-old quad-core Skylake i7 CPU-based PC is a poor buy at that well-over-$900 price tag.

Sorry, my fault, I copied a link instead of the file.

This should work:

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/52607d75-0fe3-42ad-7dbe-d36571b21f44

As I stated a couple of times, the PugetBench will not run at all on 14.1 no matter what I did. There is a huge compatibility problem between that particular version of Premiere Pro and the external program that Puget Systems uses to automate the mouse points and clicks. The program caused 14.1 to constantly crash upon the very start of the benchmark run. I had to downgrade to 14.0.4 to run the tests without NVENC.

With that version, the best overall scores that I had achieved with 14.0.4 were 637 Extended and 611 Standard with only software encoding. Compare that to the 797 and 713, respectively, with 14.2 and NVENC.

And most of that increase comes from exporting to H.264. There is little difference in timeline playback or GPU performance, with or without NVENC.

I can see why there is little real-world performance improvement with and without QuickSync at equal export bitrates: The graphics processing performance of Intel CPU IGPs is, honestly speaking, lousy to begin with.

On the other hand, had Adobe not added QuickSync support, then newer versions of Premiere Pro would have required a PC that's based on an HEDT platform with quad-channel RAM and 16 or more CPU physical cores just to even run AT ALL. That would have cut off a very sizable percentage of professionals. And your i5-9400F would not have been able to even launch Premiere Pro at all due to the system falling well below minimum CPU performance requirements.

A beta release of Premiere Pro (available to Creative Cloud subscribers under the "Beta Apps" section of the Creative Cloud desktop app) will add Nvidia's NVENC and AMD's VCE hardware encoding support (in addition to Intel's QuickSync). The NVENC, in particular, will significantly speed up H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) encodes/exports - but it will require a higher-end GPU in order for the feature to work well. Forget about low-end GT-series GeForce GPUs as they do not support NVENC at all; a GTX GPU is required for that.