Is 16GB RAM Bottlenecking My RTX 2080Ti/I7 8700K?

[zachf42704288]

I'm currently editing 4K/60M footage and I'm just not happy with the performance that Premiere is giving me. I could definitely be wrong, but I feel like the playback speed, scrubbing speed, and even the rendering speed is a little slow. I'm playing my sequence back at 1/2 quality and it still skips randomly and I feel like it shouldn't be doing that.

Based off the specs I've given you, is my 16GB 3600 DDR4 kit the bottleneck here? I'm not doing any crazy edits and I rarely use After Effects if that helps.

If you need more information just let me know. Thanks in advanced.

Zach

[Peru Bob]

It's possible.

What is your hard drive setup (how many, what kind, what is on each, and how full)?

[David Arbor]

Yes, that's likely your bottleneck with 4K footage. Don't forget that your OS and any other open applications are sharing that 16 GB of RAM. Do you have a browser with multiple tabs open? Open Task Manager and see how much RAM that's using. You need a lot of fast RAM to move those frames back and forth, so I would upgrade to 32 GB or 64 GB in pairs to take advantage of dual channel memory. If you have four slots then you should have 4x8GB sticks for 32 GB of RAM, rather than 2x16GB sticks. Here's a paper from Intel on editing 4K video: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/guides/workstation-adobe-4k-guide.pdf

[Warren Heaton]

There's an error in the last paragraph of page 3 in the Intel 4k guide.

It reads as follows:

Finally, video editors must choose how to format their RAID; the two most popular formats are level 1 and 5. Level 1 offers full speed but no protection, so that if a disk fails, some data might be lost. For this reason, many editors choose level 5, which designates one drive as a fail-safe. It’s a small trade-off: a slightly smaller RAID in return for data protection. And, the failed disk can be swapped out while the system is still up and running.

Instead of "level 1", it should read "level 0".

If you switch to Premiere Pro's Proxy workflow, you should be fine until you figure out what tweaks you want to make to your system.