HEVC Playback/Video Editing

[Facundo26101847mtxf]

Hi fellow Premiere Video Editors!

I’m facing a dilemma with my video editing setup. I have both a desktop PC and a laptop, and recently, I've been receiving footage in 4K HEVC 10-bit 4:2:0. My usual workflow has been to convert the footage to ProRes proxies for better playback in Premiere, even though it takes time and space.

However, today I received a lot of video files, and I decided to switch to my laptop (the one I typically use for work while traveling). I noticed that with the laptop, I don’t need to create proxies. I can edit directly from the HEVC files without any playback issues, even when applying effects and filters.

My question is: Based on my setup, is the improved performance on my laptop due to the GPU, or does the processor also play a role? Ideally, I’d like to only upgrade the GPU on my desktop PC (where I’m more comfortable working), since upgrading the processor would mean replacing most if not all of the computer.

Here are the specs of each machine:

(Home PC)

• 32 GB RAM 3200 MHz

• AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB

• AMD Ryzen 7 5700X

• Windows 11

(Laptop)

• 32 GB RAM 4800 MHz

• NVIDIA RTX 3070 Mobile

• Intel i7 12700H

• Acer Predator Helios 300 (2023)

• Windows 11

I’d appreciate any advice or insights! Thanks in advance!

[R Neil Haugen]

The laptop has internal encoding for H.264 in probably the CPU, maybe the GPU also.

Your desktop doesn't.

[JonesVid · Accepted solution]

As Neil has pointed out the Intel CPU had an onboard (on chip)  iGPU which is capable of bothe H264 and H265(HEVC) decoding 8 bit/10 bit 4.2.0 media

Even on my older Desktop with Intel 9900K (with iGPU) and NVidia 2070 I could edit 4K HEVC 50fps footage easiliy without having to transcode to Proxies.

I found a random third party web site post comparing the two GPU's . I can't verify its contents but it looks reasonable

https://versus.com/en/amd-radeon-rx-580-vs-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070

You might need to plan an upgrade to your PC Desktop when budget permits !

[RjL190365]

The problem here is OpenCL. Adobe video programs just do not perform well in OpenCL compared to in CUDA. Unfortunately, AMD Radeon GPUs are stuck on OpenCL in Windows whereas CUDA is restricted to Nvidia GPUs. And AMD has already depreciated not only OpenCL in general (in favor of promoting the HIP API, which no Adobe program currently supports), but also support for all of its pre-RDNA (RX 5000 series) GPUs to a reduced, legacy driver support status. Your RX 580 GPU, unfortunately, predates the RDNA architecture by two full generations. And it has always performed poorly in Adobe video programs no matter what – barely any faster (effectively) than even very recent integrated Intel IGPs to justify the money, space and power usage.

[Facundo26101847mtxf]

Sorry for the late reply to this post. I finally ran an experiment for anyone who's interested — I used a GTX 1650 to test on my desktop computer (replacing the RX580) to see if H.265 videos would process better.

The result… overwhelming. Even with this older GPU, the difference is massive. I'm surprised by how little support the RX580 has for these types of files, which are absolutely essential—at least to be able to view them on a regular workday. Even without having an Intel processor with Quick Sync, just working with a GPU that supports hardware acceleration makes a huge difference.

I'm going to upgrade my graphics card to an RTX series to solve the current issue, and later on, I might switch my whole desktop system to an Intel build.

Thanks so much to those who replied!