Very slow render on 2 CPU machine HP Z840 Workstation

Report · May 23, 2025

Hi everyone,

I'm new here, so it's nice to meet you all! 😉

I'm posting because I'm looking for advice regarding very slow rendering and overall poor performance in Adobe Premiere and After Effects on my workstation. I bought this setup expecting that a dual-CPU configuration with Xeon E5-2699 v3 processors would be more than sufficient for smooth video editing, without long wait times for rendering.

Unfortunately, rendering is extremely slow compared to, for example, an i9-14900K setup (13 minutes for a sample project), while my HP Z840 workstation takes a staggering 1 hour and 45 minutes for the same project — which is a colossal difference.

This Xeon setup has many cores, along with 64 GB of ECC RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro M4000 GPU.

However, during rendering, CPU and GPU usage stays around 5–10%, which is shockingly low. I don’t understand why this is happening. Can anyone help me identify the issue and suggest what I can do to make my machine run more efficiently?

Here is a link to my specs and Pudget rating:
After https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/profile/441ea098-371d-11f0-8113-bc241170a2bb/
Premiere: https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/profile/7d10c83c-371a-11f0-8113-bc241170a2bb/

Thanks in advance for your help!

Report · May 25, 2025

The biggest problem with that workstation is simple: Its installed GPU is outdated. That Quadro M4000 is now almost a whopping 10 years old (and based on an architecture that's almost 11 years old) at this point, and it has been depreciated for CUDA support in newer drivers. Specifically, although CUDA is still supported in newer drivers for that GPU Nvidia is now concentrating on the RTX GPUs (initially sold as Quadro RTX, then just plain RTX and now RTX PRO) from this point going forward. That means the Quadro RTX (and the related T-series) GPUs are now the oldest generation to continue receiving CUDA updates. And all pre-RTX GPUs will soon fall into legacy driver support status.

What happened in your workstation was that renders in both After Effects and Premiere Pro called for hardware acceleration of certain features that older GPUs did not support at all, which resulted in the rendering of those features falling back onto the CPU in software-only mode or not rendered at all, which in turn negatively affected the overall performance score of that workstation. Worse, most of the effects that got sent to the CPU instead of the GPU are only single-threaded when software-rendered. In other words, both After Effects and Premiere Pro expected a CUDA Compute Capability version of 7.5 or higher, but that M4000's CUDA Compute Capability version was only 5.2 (and the compute capability version is completely separate from the CUDA driver version number). And you cannot change that at all in software; the version is permanently baked into the GPU hardware.

As a result, you really need a newer-generation GPU just to keep that Methuselah of a workstation competitive in performance, although that 11-year-old CPU platform will not come anywhere close to matching a recent-generation CPU platform in overall performance.