GPUs

Following the discussions on GPU's and how they perform in PDR14/15 and the significant amount of info contributed by members, I must admit to being more than just a little confused about what we can or should expect in terms of additional performance when buying a GPU. As a result I have been looking at tests done using other editing software which have added GPU support.

Adobe Premiere has been around since 1991. I first used it (Ver 4.0) in 1994. It required a 386cpu, 8Mb ram, and Win 3.1.

I recently found this comprehensive test titled "GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Premiere Pro Performance" using a 60 second video on the timeline

"Adobe utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine which uses the video card to vastly improve the performance of certain features. This provides a tremendous boost to performance, but it adds more complexity to the question of "what hardware do I need" since you need to take into consideration how many accelerated effects you use. In this article, we want to explore the performance differences between the new GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 and the previous generation GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X using a variety of different codecs and resolutions."

The biggest shock was the hardware used on two sytems. One is a dual 12 core Xeon E5-2687W V4 CPUs at $2k each and the second has a single Core i7 6950X 10 core cpu at $1.6k. Both have 256Gb DDR4 ram. My. how times have changed!

The tests were done by Puget Systems who supply custom PCs and are an Adobe Technology Partner. Their Standard System for Premiere Pro starts at $5k.

The tests include the GTX980, 1070, 1080, and TitanX with both single and dual GPU's on each machine. I would like to see the same tests with all that CPU power and no GPUs. Note they used edit codecs and effects which are GPU optimized Effects.

I'm still confused by the results and in shock when I see the sort of hardware now being used for editing.

In general the core i7 outperformed the dual Xeons and the GPU results are mixed and, to me, disappointing.

"The GTX 1070 is about 1% faster than the GTX 980Ti and about 4% faster than the Titan X. The GTX 1080 is about 4% faster than the GTX 980Ti and about 6.5% faster than the Titan X."

Maybe forum members can shed some light.

CPUs

I have been debating the benefits of upgrading my CPU and whether more cores or a faster clock is more important.

Here is another Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 CPU Comparison by the same company with the same timeline, a single GPU card and different CPUs. The Intel Core i7-6900K 8 core cpu showed a 44% improvement over the Intel Core i7-6700K 4 core. There is a clear advantage to more cores and a single CPU for PPro. Has anyone tested 6, 8 or 10 core CPU with PDR? Should we expect similar results?

DirectX 12

There seems to be a significant increase in GPU performance with DirectX 12. Even more, previously incompatible GPUs can be combined with DX12. The impossible has happened: Testing Radeon and GeForce together in DirectX 12. Will it benefit video editing?

Al Power Director 13&14 Ultimate, Photo Director 6, Audio Dir, Pwr2Go 10
Win 10 64, Intel MB DH87MC, Intel i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16Gb DDR3 1600, 128Gb SSD, 2x1Tb WDBlue 7200rpmSATA6, Intel 4600 GPU, Gigabyte G1 GTX960 4GB, LG BluRay Writer