Performance Issues with Premiere Pro Despite High-End Specs

[Editing Ninja]

Hi everyone,

I recently built a high-end PC with the following components:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (16 cores, 170W)
  Motherboard: ASRock X670E Steel Legend
  RAM: ADATA Premier 32GB DDR5 4800MHz (x4)
  Storage: Kingston NV2 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD & Seagate 4TB IronWolf SATA SSD
  Power Supply: EVGA 1300W G2 80+ Gold Modular
  Graphics Card: Zotac RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO

Despite these powerful specs, my experience with Adobe Premiere Pro has been frustratingly slow. My timeline performance is sluggish, and I constantly have to render in and out to get a green bar, even when working on simple projects like Instagram Reels with basic transition effects from Film Impact. For reference, my preview format is set to I-Frame Only MPEG.

Interestingly, After Effects runs smoothly, even with complex projects involving 150 layers of animation. This makes the lag in Premiere Pro even more perplexing.

Shouldn't this setup be more than sufficient to handle almost anything I throw at it in Premiere Pro? Has anyone else experienced similar issues or have any suggestions on how to improve the timeline performance?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Best,
Kamil

[R Neil Haugen]

You don't say what media you're working with, which is crucial in such discussions. As well as all effects and/or plugins used. How many tracks each video and audio also ...

[Editing Ninja]

simple .mp4 files, transitions from Film Impact, 1-2 video tracks with one audio track, zero effects (maybe color correction only)

[R Neil Haugen]

"Simple" mp4 files ... typically long-GOP ... actually are the nastiest media to edit with made. 6k Red RAW will playback far easier on most rigs.

So I don't know if any AMD CPUs have the equivalent of the Nvidia "QuickSync" or "Nvenc" or whatever it is, that does hardware (in-CPU hardware specialized chips) to do long-GOP decoding/decompression.

Maybe @RjL190365 could help.

[Editing Ninja]

Thanks for the explanation! I understand a bit better now. Just to confirm, are you saying that my AMD Ryzen 9 7950X might be struggling with MP4 files because they use Long-GOP compression, which is hard to decode on the fly?

Also, you mentioned specialized hardware like Intel's QuickSync and NVIDIA's NVENC. Does my AMD setup lack an equivalent feature for handling Long-GOP video decoding efficiently?

Would using proxies or converting my footage to a less compressed format before editing help improve performance in Premiere Pro?

Thanks again for your help!

[R Neil Haugen]

This is where that RJL is handy, as they have all that knowledge down pat.

Transcoding to ProRes or a DNx variant, or using proxies with perhaps the quarter or half res option of ProRes in the Proxy/Create Proxy dialog would probably be the quickest thing to do.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

I am sorry to read about your bismal experience.

Are you sure you have updated the Nvidia graphics card to the latest version. Some here will say you have to use the studio version.

Hope this helps.

[RjL190365]

The problem here is that the footage that you're working with does not perform well for decoding on either AMD or Nvidia hardware. In fact, for the H.264 footage Intel performs better than either AMD or Nvidia alone.

And since Premiere Pro utilizes both an integrated GPU and a discrete GPU for H.264 decoding simultaneously, a 13th- or 14th-Gen Intel Core CPU in combination with that Nvidia GPU of yours would be a better choice than what you currently have.