Premiere Pro & Photo Shop-Graphics Card Performance?

I have just re-checked the SFF Windows PC, and found out that it is powered by a 10th-Gen 10-core Intel i9-10900 non-K CPU. While that CPU in itself is good, that P1000 would bottleneck the CPU somewhat. As a result, its overall performance in the Adobe apps would not be sufficiently more powerful than the 24-inch iMac to justify the massive increase in power consumption.

Premiere Pro and Photoshop each run extremely well on the Apple M1 Mac Mini.  Same for After Effects, Illustrator, Media Encoder, Auditon, Character Animator, and Animate.

I would go with the 16GB/512GB option, opting for larger internal storage is the lab budget allows for it.

Two M1 specifics notes:

• Using Cineform in Premiere Pro currently requires running Premiere Pro using Rosetta.  (ProRes is a much better choice for several reasons.)
• Importing video into Photoshop requires running Premiere Pro using Rosetta.  I have read that this should change sometime in the future.

If I could wave a magic wand and equip every computer lab with both macOS and Windows, I would.  While that's extra work from a support standpoint, students should be completely comfortable working on each platform.

The Windows system's performance will vary on the components used. Without knowing any specifics that Windows Small Form Factor PC might very well have an outdated quad-core 7th-Gen Intel CPU from early 2017, while the Quadro P1000 is very much a higher-RAM-containing but performance-nerfed GeForce GTX 1050 (lower GPU clock speeds and lesser memory throughput).

Worse for the Windows system, the Quadro P1000's GPGPU (GPU-accelerated) performance, as far as Premiere Pro is concerned, is no better than that of the M1's integrated graphics even with a monster CPU behind it! Worse, in a system the age of that planned SFF Windows system, the P1000 will actually perform worse than any current-gen integrated graphics.

As such, that planned Windows SFF system might actually be weaker in performance than the M1 Mac Mini.

And the iMac does have its own issues, such as not being able to be upgraded internally at all. You will have to rely on external SSD storage for your video and/or project files, especially if your chosen M1 Mac Mini has less than 1 TB of internal storage. The best choice for an external SSD would be a Thunderbolt 3 external SSD; unfortunately, such SSDs cost well over double those of the more common USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 external SSDs (on a per-GB basis).

I’m more familiar with Macs, but anyway:

The Windows computer’s Nvidia Quadro P1000 is a discrete graphics card with 4GB graphics memory. Without being familiar with it, that’s a lot better than the integrated graphics found in most PCs, and its CUDA cores help with video.

For the Mac, the graphics hardware (the 8-core GPU) is built into the M1 system-on-a-chip processor, and it takes its graphics memory from the main system memory. That means the amount of Unified Memory you order affects how much graphics memory the computer can have. Graphics memory is not limited to a couple of GB like it is with Intel integrated graphics; potentially any unused system memory is up for grabs. This is a great thing on one of the Macs that can have 32GB or more, because if macOS, Premiere Pro, Photoshop need only 20GB total, all the rest can potentially be graphics memory.

If you are looking at the M1 Mac mini, the problem there is that the current model has a limit of 16GB unified memory. That means after the system and Photoshop or Premiere Pro take they memory they need, the potential amount of memory left over to be available to graphics could be less than on an Nvidia Quadro P1000. That could affect graphics acceleration.

As for which system would be faster overall, it’s hard to say without actually testing them, and the exact model name of both computers was not mentioned. The best thing to do is pick up one of each, run your typical courses on them, and see how well they perform. The Apple M1 includes hardware encoders that can accelerate H.264, 8-bit HEVC, and 10-bit HEVC, so if your courses use those codecs, that might be an advantage. But Nvidia cards have their own well-regarded video encoders in hardware, so again, if you can budget for a test between one machine each, that would be the way to find out which one to order in bulk.

If the results are close, it might come down to whether it’s easy to upgrade the Windows PC, because after purchase you cannot internally upgrade the Mac mini. This might allow the PC to last through more budget cycles. But only as long as that small form factor PC is not limited in some way that would cause you to have to buy the whole thing over again if it falls behind.

Moved to hardware forum.