I love that feeling when I’m done with a Premiere Pro project, everything is neatly laid out on the sequence timeline, music’s good, voiceover on spot and then… Then It hits me, and all the joy evaporates away when I realize that I still have to that last, final and pretty uneasy step for all editors – exporting the project. At that point I might as well start a completely new project cause sometimes it can take a while to render out a video, almost as long as it takes for me to edit it when I have all the necessary materials, or it can take even longer than that if I come across onto problems like Premiere Pro mysteriously refusing to render out the video completely or stopping at a certain percentage while exporting. Why? Just because, there’s no apparent reason, rarely is.
Enough ranting, I’m not here to complain (sorry, it just comes naturally when mentioning Premiere Pro), but rather to check out how does an RTX 2080 Ti graphics card stack together with Premiere Pro when it comes to exporting time and performance, and in my case, I will be matching those numbers to my GTX 1050 Ti which I currently have In my main editing PC. That said, let’s check how exactly can RTX 2080 Ti Premiere Pro performance reflect your workflow! Oh, yeah, a sidenote – for all the details and more specific data, feel free to check out the video.
Premiere Pro render settings for RTX 2080 Ti
Preparing the project for the process of video exporting can be a bit overwhelming for a first time user. My premise here is that if you’re already reading this article you have or you are looking for an RTX 2080 Ti, so you do know something about this topic and how to properly set up your export settings. If you’re not that familiar with it, or you want to maybe improve yours for the best outcome possible, this next paragraph could be for you.
Since I record my videos in 4K resolution (100 Mbps bitrate), I pretty much always export my final project in a 4K video format. Sometimes I would use 1080p 60 FPS for that flexibility option of possibly slowing down the footage in post-production for a cool panning or sliding effect, but most I would the time it’s 4K in question. My output format is pretty much always .mp4 file using H.264 codec, since YouTube still doesn’t support H.265, while I’m not that big fan of VP9, at least not yet. Now that this is sorted out, we’re ready to check out Premiere Pro RTX 2080 Ti exact performance behavior.
My video output settings usually consists out of using the VBR 1 pass option (60 – 90 Mbps bitrate), I do not use the Render At Maximum Depth nor the Maximum Render Quality option, as it prolongs the export process and also, in my case, I do not benefit that much from it quality wise. I also don’t use VBR 2 pass in general for that same reason, and especially in this specific scenario where I want to check out how one GPU compares to other GPU performance wise in Premiere Pro, since the VBR 2 pass algorithm doesn’t support GPU acceleration, but rather uses just CPU for performing that task, so the export time is much much longer. VBR 2 pass export is also a hit and miss for my case, I rarely manage to export a file with 2 passes in the first try, because as of lately Adobe Premiere Pro is filled with all kinds of bugs (insert “all the things” meme here). I leave the compression audio as it is (AAC, 320 Kbps) and that’s pretty much it, you’re ready to hit that export button.
RTX 2080 Ti Premiere Pro performance
And now, let’s get to the part I was most curious about and probably you will too – Premiere Pro render performance with an RTX 2080 Ti. As a content creator who uses Creative Cloud suite, primarily the Premiere Pro for video editing, as I said at the beginning, I wanted to check out what’s the difference in rendering and export times real-time scrubbing through footage when jumping from a GTX 1050 Ti which I have in my main machine, to a monster like RTX 2080 Ti which current price is almost ten times of the GP107. Of course, it’s obvious that the discrepancy will be huge between these two models, but I really wanted to see by how much exactly. And… suffice to say, I was not disappointed.
Exporting my just a bit below 6 minutes long 4K video clip, with few After Effects animations, title, color grade, and color correction overlays, and of course using CUDA acceleration, took a total of around 29 minutes with the GTX 1050 Ti. On the other hand exporting with RTX 2080 Ti Premiere Pro project ended up with halving that time, or to be precise, around 14 minutes in total for the job, which is around 15 minutes quicker.
Scrubbing through footage and playing it in real-time with Gainward RTX 2080 Ti GS resulted in almost 0 dropped frames with full 4K playback resolution wchih makes it a top Adobe Premiere graphics card pick, occasionally it would drop some if you’re passing through a heavy loaded clip with warp stabilization and other effects and overlays, but if you want to make it completely bulletproof, you can always use one half for the playback resolution, although. I personally wouldn’t mind a dropped frame here or there considering the resolution gain, with my GTX 1050 Ti that is one-fourth of it at best.
In the end, is the RTX 2080 Ti good Adobe Premiere graphics card?
The short answer to the title question of this paragraph would be yes, but the longer answer is a bit more complicated. Double the speed for almost ten times the price doesn’t sound that appealing and first sight and makes you think for a bit. But, bottom line, it all depends if its worth to you down the line, it’s just simple math what it is. If you can pay off this card in a for you a reasonable amount of time (6-12 months), by doing what you do for a living and where a graphics card plays a crucial part of your everyday workflow, then definitely yes, go for it. Premiere Pro RTX 2080 Ti performance gain resulted in 100% increase over my base point, but even if it’s less than that, let’s say by 20-30%, the difference still quickly adds up over time, and that’s something you can’t get back if you have time-sensitive projects.
If you’re on the other hand not that time-bound, you can easily go for a more reasonable choice, like the GTX 1070 / 1060 or even the RTX 2070, although I would maybe suggest for you to wait a bit and see what’s going to happen with more mainstream models of RTX Turing NVIDIA graphics cards when it comes to their performance output. With that said, it’s not that I’m going to run out and buy myself an RTX 2080 Ti, far from it, but I wouldn’t mind having something close to its performance for editing in Premiere Pro, although, to be honest, I would rather love to see it being polished out some more on the software side.
