Premiere Pro in all
of its processor-
eating glory
AMD BUILD
FEATURE
AMD vs. INTEL
The video editing community is divided on
which editing software is best. Apple’s Final Cut
Pro and Adobe’s Premiere Pro are the two most
commonly used applications. Although
Premiere offers a far greater set of tools than itsbarely supported Apple counterpart, Final Cut
Pro’s render times are far superior, especially
when it comes to exporting 4K video. That said,
Final Cut Pro isn’t available on Windows,
therefore anyone lacking the investment intoApple’s Mac OS ecosystem has little choice
when it comes to video editing software.
We used Adobe Premiere Pro CC for our
real-world benchmarks, taking 180GB-worth of
files, a preconstructed Adobe project file,
rendering out in 4K in H.264 at maximum bit
depth and render quality, and timing how long it
took each machine to complete the task.
As far as performance goes, Premiere is
always a mixed bag, because it relies heavily on
both the CPU and the GPU, leveraging
workloads to whichever core makes the most
sense. Its Media Rendering engine supports
both OpenCL and CUDA, with the latter taking
centre stage when it comes to eking out that
extra performance. The number of cores and
clock speed also matter, because although not
every processor is fully utilised during
rendering, the more you have and the faster
those individual cores run, the better.
On top of that, we also ran our X265
benchmark. This is an interesting one because it
doesn’t rely on any particular GPU, but purely
transcodes video from one file format into
another, so it acts as a fairly heavy synthetic
CPU test, producing average fps figures for four
consecutive runs, which are then averaged out.VIDEO RENDERING
Both of the machines we built are incredible. But
in terms of raw performance, there’s no getting
away from the fact that Intel’s Core i7-6950X is
an absolute beast. It is expensive, though, and
getting the best from that chip will set you back
a serious amount of cash. Our Ryzen machine,
meanwhile, is much more thrifty, which means
that while we do lose out in the drag race of
straight performance, Ryzen has the Intel
system easily beat in terms of value for money- 20 per cent performance improvements in
most of the tests doesn’t balance well with the
80 per cent price difference.
In light of that, you could emphasise the win
on this front by focusing even more on the value
of the individual components. We wouldn’t step
away from the core of the RAM, motherboard,
and CPU (although an argument could certainly
be made for stepping down to the Ryzen 7
1700), but everything else is potentially up for
grabs. You could pick a more affordable power
supply, and while we’re personally huge fans of
the case, it’s an obvious place to save a bit of
cash – especially as it won’t affect the
bottom-line performance at all.
The one component that would be easy to
replace is the graphics card, as you could hit
pretty much the same performance in many
tasks by swapping to a Radeon RX 580 (saving
£200). Of course, if you use applications thatbenefit from a pro-level card, that doesn’t make
sense, but for everyone else, it’s an easy win.
Overall we’re happy with how the Ryzen build
came together, and how it has performed. It’s a
strong system that proves that AMD is back on a
par with Intel. We still have a few reservations in
some areas – RAM support is still not quite
where we would like it to be, and as the platform
is new, we ran into problems during testing that
we couldn’t be certain weren’t down to the
particular test, so that’s worth factoring in. Even
so, if you’re looking to build a power workstation
machine, AMD is definitely an option once again,
and it’s been a while since we’ve been able to
say that with confidence.VIEWSET RYZEN WORKSTATION ZERO POINT INTEL WORKSTATION
Premiere Pro
(Seconds)^901 (-9%)^824733 (11%)
X265 Benchmark
(fps) 29.56 (41%) 20.93 35.92 (72%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%Our desktop zero-point has a Core i7-7700K running at a stock frequency of 4.5GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB,
16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, mounted on an Asus Maximus IX Hero mobo.
VIDEO RENDERING
AMD CONCLUSION
The value proposition