GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2020 enables content creators to speed up video editing workflows, so even advanced multilayer timelines with sophisticated effects (such as Lumetri color effects) can be played, scrubbed, and edited in real time without losing frames. That at least would be the ideal case. The Mercury Playback Engine supports CUDA and OpenCL as two methods of hardware acceleration, although some OpenCL implementations can cause problems. However, both work, even if the number of supported filters does not quite match.
Today’s benchmark is based on several sequences, such as a 4K intro with various effects and sounds on two video layers and one layer with title graphics. Among the applied effects are: Lens distortion, Gaussian blur, mosaic, search borders, together with video transformations (rotation). Another sequence represents a completely edited music video with 4K upscaling, including luma curve adjustment, fast blur, noise, hue changes, RGB curves, black and white effects, image mixing and video overlay.
Finally, the third sequence shows the simultaneous processing of a total of three Full HD subsequences within a single 4K timeline. Three separate sub-sequences are shown, whereby one sequence is additionally duplicated. All effects for the subsequences are processed within the master timeline.
In the benchmarks I compare first the performance of the hardware-based real-time playback for the first two sequences. The real-time preview of the timelines ideally runs at around 24 FPS, anything significantly below that is jerky and disturbs the work. The third one runs on all cards with more than 23 FPS and thus acceptably fast:.
Let’s now test the pre-rendering for sequences one and three. Pre-rendering avoids all of the above stagnation of course, but it also takes a lot of time. Again, scene three is the most balanced, so I chose it as a contrast to scene one.
