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Participant
June 5, 2020
Question

Poor Adobe Premiere performance on Threadripper

  • June 5, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1533 views

Hi, 

 

Looking for some advice, we've just switched from a 2010 Mac pro to a Threadripper 3970x/RTX 2080 Super build with 64GB of Memory, and the switch has been poor to say the least. 

 

We're only dealing with 1080p footage but we've seen usability drop as we've moved from the Mac across to the Threadripper with an increase in dropped frames sometimes even on single clips with no effects.

 

The reason we switched was predominantly due to the fact that the Mac was starting to struggle with 5/6 camera multi-cam footage but the Threadripper struggles to manage it even to a level on par with the 10 year old Mac.

 

Both systems are running the same up to date version of CC and the Threadripper has NVMe SSDs for footage, whilst the Mac is still coping with HDDs. Even on exporting we're not seeing the gains we expected. 

 

We've run a number of benchmarks to make sure the HW is not the issue and they all came back with the expected performance.

 

I'd at least expect the 3970x to do better than a 10 year old Mac.

 

Any ideas on what we could try to get a usable experience out of our new kit? and just to note we've tried fixes such as turning CUDA on/off, messing with the Nividia control panel, transcoding all h.264 footage to prores

 

 

[Moderator note: moved to best forum.]

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

Legend
June 6, 2020

Here's why:

 

Although a highly-threaded CPU does improve export performance, simple video playback does not currently take full advantage of more than about 8 to 10 cores for 1080p. After 10 cores, performance improvements begin to flatline.

 

I am sorry to tell you this, but you bought a severely overqualified PC for the job that you're trying to do. But the reason why your old Mac Pro choked on multicam sequemces is because the old 1st-Generation Intel Core CPUs (Nehalem/Westmere) have such poor single-core performance by today's standards.

 

As such, for the job that you're doing, perhaps a Ryzen 7 3700X or an Intel i9-10900K would have been a better fit for your job.

jphm951Author
Participant
June 6, 2020

Hi, understand your angle and completely agree, the main reason for the upgrade to TR was to improve export performance and general multitasking. (We do work for projects in AE as well as premiere)

 

My main gripe would be understanding why playback even though reliant on single core performance has gotten worse with a CPU that had better single core performance. 

Legend
June 6, 2020

The reason is rather simple. Simple playback not only cannot leverage all those cores, but there are significant latencies in higher-core-count CPUs compared to lower-core-count CPUs with all that affinity-switching.

 

In addition, which version of Windows 10 are you running? Home? Pro? If you are running Home, then that 3970X is at the very upper limit of total thread count supported by Windows 10 Home itself. Though Home really works better with only 16 cores and 32 threads than with 32 cores and 64 threads. Plus, Home really cannot leverage the full capabilities of Threadripper.

John T Smith
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2020

Test your computer to find out how well it will work
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/PugetBench-for-Premiere-Pro-1519/
-Benchmark test program available for Premiere Pro CC2019 and CC2020

MyerPj
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2020

This is mostly a 'bounce' for you. But I think you'll get it worked out, you may just need to do some optimizing. The one problem I can see is your processor has 32cores, wow! The thing is, with my six cores (i7-6850k) and a matching 64gb memory, that's over 10.5gb per core. Yours is a measly 2gb per core. So, when you can get a lot more memory, things should improve. On your task manager 'performance' tab, (CPU) how many process are running? Mine has 95-97 shortly after booting. Many more than this could be a problem also.