premiere not using resources?

[omen21]

Premiere is constantly bogging down on me, and does not use ANY available resources.
I'm working in a 1080 timeline, with 4k footage.  My specs are:

2x Xeon 2670's (16 cores)

40GB ECC ram

PCIE scratch disk (2000mbps)

Separate System drive raid 0(700mbps)

External Raid 0 HDD for files (300mbps)

GTX 1080 GPU

Yet, playback when using Neat video is 1-2fps AT BEST, usually it will just freeze.  If I use something like "Cosmo" from magic bullet, I'll get 10fps.  I have never seen my CPU used at more than 20% during playback or export.  Hard drives are never more than 5%, and GPU is at 20% and may fluctuate up to 33% for a brief second.  My RAM usage sits at 50% most of the time.  I have zero idea where I'm bottlenecking.  I honestly had the same performance with my Macbook pro.  I'm aware that neat video is a beast, but I see no benefit in the better specs of the Xeon machine w/ a 1080, vs a mobile i7 with a mobile gpu.

Would any upgrade help me?  I'm totally willing to throw money at this issue.

[Bill Gehrke]

Test your system with my Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) and submit the results.  This set of four tests will stress your CPU, GPU and the storage system.  Maybe we can identify some weaknesses.  Also with each specific test you should be able to see your system run at near 100%  The CPU intensive will show CPU usage and the GPU intensive test will stress your GPU.

[omen21]

Downloading now....

[omen21]

Ran everything, and got this:
Windows Script Host Error

Line 54
Char 1
Error File not FOund

[Bill Gehrke]

That just means the script does not find your exported files CUT and paste them to the project folder, copying changes the timestamps.

[omen21]

"47","82","35","286", Premiere Version:, 11.0.2.47

[omen21]

seems to be pretty slow  in comparison with other similar rigs.  I'd think the 2 xeons would perform better.  Maybe a switch to Ryzen would be beneficial?

[Bill Gehrke]

Pretty good scores

"47","82","35","286", Premiere Version:, 11.0.2.47

1. Lets start with the last number the CPU intensive 286 seconds.  If you look at the CPU data on my PPBM8 web site you will see you are doing relatively good.  Did you check CPU usage during this test?  My overclocked i7-5960X 4.5GHz 8-core with Premiere 11 scores 250 second
2. The third number is the same timeline as above but with GPU acceleration and you can see that your 36 seconds with your GTX 1080 is fairly good but I do not understand why my experiments with a superclocked GTX1080 is so much lower (better) but my 15 seconds is a lot faster.  With GPU-Z find out the actual Memory Clock speed while being used by PPBM looking at the Sensors Tab while it is loaded.  It should show ~99% GPU load.
3. The first number 47 seconds is your export disk performance is very close to what I got with a M.2 PCI3 Gen 3 x4 with a Samsung XP941 of course now days it may be another vendor to only get ~800MB/second write rate on your "2000MB/second" device .  Despite this it still is better than SATA III devices which is very good.  I hope you normally used this device for all your project files.
4. The remaining number of 82 seconds for the very complex H.264 timeline and it is both CPU and GPU intense.  By my standards it is a little high.  What driver version are you using for your GTX 1080?

Were you using your high speed  SSD for all your project files?

[omen21]

1080 driver is 381.65
My "2000mb/sec" drive is always used for my project files, and is a 2000mb/sec read, so 800 write is expected.
The slow h.264 time could be because of the Xeon architecture, since they don't have any built in h.264 acceleration like the i7's.

CPU usage was at 100%, but GPU usage during GPU intensive benches, was never above 85%.  Most of the time it was around 80%.

[omen21]

Just ran it again.
GPU is around 50% usage, CPU at 70%

[Bill Gehrke]

Premiere Pro sometimes learns as you use it so that might be the reason for less CPU usage.  If you look at dropped frames when playing back a complex timelines You will generally see appreciable fewer dropped frames the second time you play it.   If you clean the Media Cache folders it will start all over with more skipped frames.

Since you are not seeing almost 100% usage of the GPU it means that a better or additional GPU would be of no help.

P.S. If you look at my Storage page on that web site you will see that "My "2000mb/sec" drive is always used for my project files, and is a 2000mb/sec read, so 800 write is expected." is not true with all M.2 or PCIe drives it is easy to get double that speed.  Intel and others have designed their super speed SSD's for high I/O operations like database usage and that sacrifices the sequential write speed performance used in our video editing

[omen21]

So, in order to get a somewhat real time playback with neat video in 1080p, the 2670's have to go?

[RjL190365]

Yes. The 2670s are already five years old at this point, and as such limit the PCIe bandwidth to PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. Those 2670s do not support PCIe 3.0 at full bandwidth at all.

[omen21]

would upgrading to different xeon's be advisable or switching over to a faster speed, fewer core option like Ryzen be more advisable?  It seems like less cores with faster clocks seem to be better for Neat Video.