Following up on this, I have now started to see one user testing several low-end PCs with the new 14.3 beta of Premiere Pro, using various current-generation and newly-released low-end CPUs, 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and what appears to be a typical SATA SSD storage setup. NVENC is enabled, but none of the Intel CPUs used in the comparison that I am to present have QuickSync enabled or present. For comparison, a 6-core/12-thread first-generation Ryzen 5 1600 and a three-year-old 4-core/8-thread Kaby Lake i7-7700K were included in the testing.

The results are quite surprising: Both of the low-end 9th-Generation (current) Intel CPUs - the i3-9100F, and to a lesser extent the i5-9400F - ended up bottlenecking the RTX 2080 Ti substantially. In fact, the 9100F/RTX 2080 Ti combo perfectly illustrates the opposite extreme of a severely imbalanced PC setup: A GPU that's severely overqualified for the CPU. While the RTX 2080 Ti scored between 66 and 68 in the GPU score in the other cheap PCs in this roundup, the RTX 2080 Ti in the i3-9100F scored well below the others in GPU score - more like what a higher-end PC would have scored using merely an RTX 2060 SUPER. That means that effectively, a cheap PC with such an overqualified GPU would perform no better in anything than that same PC would with a much cheaper, lesser-performing GPU such as a plain, non-SUPER RTX 2060; in other words, the PC owner with such a lopsided GPU-heavy configuration would just be throwing money away for practically zero performance improvement. The opposite example of an imbalanced PC configuration would be a GPU that's so weak compared to the CPU that it would choke the life out of everything that ran on such a misconfigured PC (and yes, that would have been ME flashing a choke sign at the sight of such a severely bottlenecked system).

Three other CPUs - the old i7-7700K, the current Ryzen 5 3400G APU and the new Ryzen 3 3100 - are grouped together in a tier that's distinctly above the i5-9400F (meaning that the overall Standard preset scores in PugetBench for Premiere Pro 0.9 for all three are within 10 points of one another, centered around the 500-point mark). Above that tier is the old Ryzen 5 1600. Finally, the new Ryzen 3 3300X, which would almost pass for everyday video editing chores; in fact, that 3300X, despite having only 4 cores and 8 threads, actually outperformed some older 6-core/12-thread CPUs in this test. And that's the biggest surprise in this round-up; however, it boiled down to the differences in the disk I/O throughput between the older and the newer AMD chipsets used in the systems in the roundup: The 1600 was running on the older X470 chipset while the 3000-series CPUs were running on the newer X570 chipset.

However, when another user tested three of the low-end AMD CPUs in the older version of Premiere Pro, using software-only encoding and with only 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2080 SUPER, the scores predictably dropped, to the point where the 2.5-year-old 6-core/12-thread CPU regained the edge over the newest 4-core/8-thread CPU. The difference in the relative ranking came down to the CPU processing power, where the older 6-core/12-thread CPU still ruled in this test. Here, the newer X570 chipset was used with all three of the CPUs (although the X570 chipset does not officially support any of the first-generation Zen-based Ryzen CPUs without integrated graphics).

One should note that these tests were designed to determine the feasibility of an older or lower-end PC for video editing duties, using a relatively modern hardware-intensive NLE software, in a pinch. Of course, they would be no match for any modern, higher-end PC for this purpose.

One more note:

These results are exactly why I ended up choosing an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X for my $1000 platform/GPU upgrade build (at the time, the 3800X was priced only $30 higher than that of the 3700X). Had the 3800X been at regular price, then I would have gone with the 3700X instead. With the AMD CPU-based upgrade, I was able to squeeze in 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER into that low of a budget. Had I gone with Intel instead, I would have been trapped between a rock and a hard place, as none of the Intel CPU options within my CPU budget offered enough of a performance improvement over whichever older 4-core CPU that I was using at the time to justify spending that much money on, while the one Intel CPU option that did would have forced me to cut corners on everything else in that platform/GPU upgrade package.

Posted on 2020-05-06 15:14:52