Testing the real (and confusing) GPU acceleration impact on Premiere Pro

I found my gpu performance monitoring software was showing a very little usage (or none) when using Premiere Pro 2017 in tasks where supposedly are accelerated by the graphics card such as warp stabilizer, exporting, etc.

I only was able to see certain peaks of activity but inmediatelly go down to 0% and searching the web and this forum I found other people are worried about this.

Is the GPU helping?

So I made some test.

Here is my build:

i7 3820 oc at 4,6ghz 4 cores 8 threads (this old boy keeps giving nice performance)

32gb ram

gtx 1050 ti

os and apps in SSD

project files, cache, renders and exports in a Samsung 960 evo m.2 disk via pcie adapter

I did some test with and without gpu acceleration in project settings with two 17 sec clips 1080 50p and 4k 25p

(gigabyte gpu monitoring software and GPU-z is what I use to see activity)

*minutes

                                                                                         cpu only                         mercury playback engine gpu acceleration cuda

apply warp stabilizer

4k                                                                                          5:21,63                                                  5:19,53

1080                                                                                      2:45,00                                                  2:43,00

render preview warp stab. applied

4k                                                                                         00:40,50                                                 0        

1080                                                                                     00:48,10                                                 0        

render preview 40% slower with optical flow

4k                                                                                         03:06,61                                                  00:53,89

1080                                                                                     04:59,00                                                  01:32,55        

export to h265

4k to 4k                                                                               02:25,10                                                   00:29,10

1080 to 1080                                                                       01:18,53                                                   00:19,53

Now that I see the results it is obvious that Gpu is helping (a lot) but it is not showing the expcted intense activity like the CPU does. So the GPU works in a different way or the monitoring software is not doing well.

I´m waiting for a 1080 ti. When it arrives I´ll do some comparisons with the 1050 ti. Although I´ll be expecting some differences I´m sure the 5x times more expensive card won´t give me 5x more performance.