No difference in upgrade

[John5C10]

Hi everyone,

I have an AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 32GB RAM and a Nvidia 1060-6GB. When I built my system I followed all recommendations and have SSDs and of course cache & scratch is separted on it's own SSD, CUDA is activated, etc.

I had a small upgrade budget so I purchased a Nvidia RT 3050-8GB. I cleaned the media cache database and installed fresh studio drivers. I also configured the program setting in the Nvidia panel like setting opengl rendering and MFAA on, etc.

Even when editing at 1080, whenever I added a mogrt or anything it sometimes spins and slows down. One specific mogrt I downloaded from Adobe even crashed during rendering on both cards as it seems the cards can't handle it.

With the regular effect and editing I saw no difference between the two cards and when I render it still only utilizes about 30% of the GPU and 4 out of 6 GB and it was only about 10 minutes faster. I see the CPU usage at like 90% during rendering and memory used 28/32GB.

So my questions are:

1) Would my money be better spent upgrading a CPU or memory to 64GB? or

2)  Should I spend a little more and get an even better Nvidia card with 12GB like a 3060 or more?

[R Neil Haugen]

PrPro uses the CPU as the base of operations, the GPU is an assistant used for certain specified things. It's not an extension of the CPU.

The "GPU Accelerated Effects List" tells what effects are sent through the GPU. It's mostly based on color/tonal changes (Lumetri & similar) and size changing (Warp and others).

So if your seqeunce has much color or size changing (or time ramping) the GPU will get called on. If it doesn't, the GPU won't get a lot of use.

So ... do you work heavily with color/size/time-changes? If so, upping your GPU especially for CUDA cores and Vram is good.

If you don't use a lot of color/size/time changes, then upping the CPU capability is more important. But then CPU capability is the prime, first choice for Premiere users. You match with a GPU that will handle what you'll throw at it.

And ... fast internal drives as large SSDs for programs/cache/media files are of course needed.

Neil

[Peru Bob]

Moved to the Video Hardware forum.

[Andy 1968]

Your CPU is the weakest link. The Nvidia GTX 1060 was a better match for your Ryzen 5 1600 than the RTX 3050. 32 GB of RAM is decent. You can upgrade the CPU but I would prefer you switch to Intel if you edit H.264/265. Quick Sync is worth the price of admission. It is good to have both Nvenc and Quick Sync. The video link below might be helpful. My system only has 32GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM. 

[RjL190365]

As Andy1968 stated, your CPU is the weakest link. The CPU utilization of 90% while the GPU utilization chillaxed at 30-ish % even with heavy effects is the giveaway.

Your results clearly showed that nothing can improve the performance of that system by a sufficient enough margin to justify the cost of any upgrade that you can do for that system as long as your PC continues to use the AMD platform. You'd simply be wasting more money on that rig for as long as you continue to use the GPUs that you currently have because any CPU upgrade that is worthwhile for that system will be significantly bottlenecked by either GPU - and as a result, you will need to spend way above what I believe to be your maximum budget for multiple hardware upgrades just to produce a meaningful increase in overall performance.

If the RTX 3050 is within the return window for the reseller that you purchased it from, I'd suggest that you return it ASAP, and put what refund or credit that you'd receive towards the bigger purchase of a near-complete system rebuild (this means a new CPU, a new motherboard and a new GPU, and possibly new RAM).

For the record, my i7-12700K DDR4 system has been getting only middling scores in the PugetBench for Premiere Pro because my RTX 2060 SUPER GPU is now the weakest link of my current build. During encoding to HEVC 4k 23.976 fps (Rec. 709) using hardware encoding my CPU is only bouncing around between 50% and 60% while my GPU is pegged to 100%.

I am saving up eventually for a new RTX 4000 series GPU or a higher-end RTX 3000 series GPU for my system, whichever will become or remain available.