E5-2690v2 compatible with Premiere Pro

[acesi7]

Hey all,

I've got a home server with Dual E5-2690v2's and was hoping I could run Premiere Pro CC on that for the extra grunt.

However the minimum specs on the Adobe website say I need a 6th Gen Intel Processor for hardware acceleration. Is that correct?

Was hoping to use a GTX 1060 and the Dual E5's to increase my render speed as my main PC is a Surface Book which is painfully slow.

Any assistance on the topic would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

[Ann Bens]

However the minimum specs on the Adobe website say I need a 6th Gen Intel Processor for hardware acceleration. Is that correct?

That is correct.

You can use the gtx  for the MPE.

Read this on what cuda does and does not do

CUDA, OpenCL, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro | Adobe Blog

[acesi7]

First off, thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

Secondly, So the E5-2690v2's are 3rd Gen Intel (Ivy Bridge). So does this mean I won't be able to utilize a GPU at all? Do you know what technology this Xeon doesn't have that is required?

Thanks for your help!

[RjL190365]

As to your question of that E5 Xeon, no, you will not be able to utilize hardware H.264 accelerated encoding because it lacks integrated graphics, and thus it requires a discrete GPU just to even work at all. No Socket 20xx CPUs have integrated graphics at all!

[acesi7]

Sorry, I think you are misunderstanding. I know I can't use Hardware Acceleration with the Xeon's only, I'm asking why I can't use those Xeon's + the 1060 for Hardware Acceleration. As per this document.

Hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding	Mac OS 10.13 (or later) on Mac hardware from 2016 or later Windows 10 with 6th Generation (or later) Intel® Core™ processors and Intel Graphics enabled
Hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding	Mac OS 10.13 (or later) on Mac hardware from 2016 or later Windows 10 with 7th Generation (or later) Intel® Core™ processors and Intel Graphics enabled

Does the above not apply if I have a discrete graphics card?

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

Integrated graphics is REQUIRED and ENABLED in order for the H.264 hardware acceleration to even work at all. If you have a qualifying CPU but then DISABLE the Intel HD Graphics in the EFI, then you cannot have hardware H.264 encoding acceleration at all. And as I noted in my previous post, your dual-Xeons (or any high-end large-socket CPUs at all) does not have any integrated Intel HD graphics whatsoever, so you cannot have hardware acceleration at all.

So, the ONLY way to have both H.264 and MPE acceleration with a discrete GPU would have been to connect your monitors only to the discrete GPU ports but then force the Intel HD Graphics to ALWAYS ENABLED in the EFI. (The default setting for this is AUTO, which disables any GPU whose ports are not being used.) But if you connect a monitor to the motherboard video-out port, then you will "block" (or "lock out") the discrete GPU from ever using MPE GPU acceleration, and thus only the integrated Intel HD Graphics will be used for MPE acceleration.

Thus, with your dual Xeons you cannot have hardware-accelerated encoding in any case - even with a discrete GPU. (There is a third-party NVENC plugin for H.26x accelerated encoding via CUDA, but Adobe does not endorse or support it - at least not yet.)

[acesi7]

Thanks for that. While this does answer my question, I didn't quite understand it entirely, and after some googling, I stumble upon another help thread that was also asking a similar question, this answer provided everything I needed to know perfectly and in conjunction with your answer here.

After reading this other answer, I noticed it was also published by you! So you helped me many times through this experience. Some of which without even knowing! Thanks heaps RjL190365. Appreciate you patience.

Link to other thread.

RjL190365  wrote

The Intel H.264 hardware accelerated encoder is not compatible at all with your system or any other HEDT ("High-End DeskTop") system. (To be more precise, you must have a 6th- or later generation  Intel i3, i5 or i7 CPU with integrated Intel HD or UHD Graphics 5xx or higher series, and that integrated graphics must be enabled, in order to use Adobe's implementation of the encoder. 5th generation and earlier Intel i-series CPUs with HD Graphics with 4-digit code numbers will not work with that feature as they are too old to be supported.)

And you cannot enable hardware acceleration at all for encoding because your Titan X Pascal requires the NVENC encoder, which Premiere Pro does not natively support. As a result, you're stuck entirely with software-only encoding (at least for now) on your HEDT platform. Otherwise, you will have to "downgrade" your CPU platform to a mainstream (Socket LGA 1151 and a non-X chipset) platform or a mobile (laptop) platform just to use the Intel hardware H.264 encoder.

[RjL190365]

I would not suggest any dual-CPU PC for Premiere Pro because such systems have significantly greater latency than any single-CPU system. You see, although the QPI between the two CPUs is relatively fast, it is still significantly slower than any in-single-CPU connection.

[acesi7]

Thanks heaps for getting back to me so quickly.

I'm planning on running it as a VM (Unless you all think this is crazy). So I can give it full affinity with 1 CPU to limit the QPI restriction between the CPUs, and pass through 1 GPU, again only if it's possible/worth while.

I would have imagined that E5-2690v2 (10 core, 20 thread, 3.0-3.6ghz) would be faster than the i7 8650U (4 core, 8 thread 1.9-4.2ghz) in the Surface Book 2, even with only the 10 core passed through to the VM. Or is that incorrect.

Apologies if these are obvious answers, I'm pretty new to video editing, and couldn't find anything on my specific situation.

[RjL190365]

Not always. That Ivy Bridge EP CPU (E5-2690 v2) is actually slightly less efficient per clock cycle than the newer-gen Kaby Lake Refresh CPU (i7-8650U). As such, the Xeon is faster than the 8650U, if only because of its substantially higher sustainable all-core Turbo clock speed. The U-series mobile CPUs can only sustain about 2.4 to 2.5 GHz, depending on cooling, on all four simultaneous cores.

[acesi7]

RjL190365  wrote

Not always. That Ivy Bridge EP CPU (E5-2690 v2) is actually slightly less efficient per clock cycle than the newer-gen Kaby Lake Refresh CPU (i7-8650U). As such, the Xeon is faster than the 8650U, if only because of its substantially higher sustainable all-core Turbo clock speed. The U-series mobile CPUs can only sustain about 2.4 to 2.5 GHz, depending on cooling, on all four simultaneous cores.

Thanks for all your help. Thought I would update this incase someone else had the same thoughts as me.

So can confirm that a VM with 8 cores, 16 threads running on Ivy-Bridge architecture and 32gb of RAM (No GPU), will run approximately 10% faster than the SurfaceBook 2 with i7 8650U and GTX1060, However, if I selected "Use Maximum Render Quality" The server was 50% slower. Taking 40 minutes to export a 27 minute video, vs 21 minutes for the Surface. So for me personally, at best I could make the server 10% faster, and at worst 50% slower. This the surface book 2 an easy choice as it was far more convenient.

Video shot in 2.7k (GoPro) outputting 720p.

Exporting both HEVC and H.264 yielded similar results.

[Martin Douglas]

I would add a discrete GPU for the mercury playback engine (cuda)

You will get a lot better performance

Martin

[acesi7]

I was under the impression that I need an Intel Integrated Graphics in order for a discrete GPU to work at all... Is that not the case?

[Martin Douglas]

Only for H.264 Hardware acceleration which is different from the mercury playback engine.

The Mercury playback engine accelerates certain effects including scaling.

https://blog.pond5.com/21645-how-to-optimize-performance-in-adobe-premiere-pro-cc/

[Ann Bens]

Might want to read this:

CUDA, OpenCL, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro | Adobe Blog