Adobe Premiere Pro: AMD Ryzen 7000 Series vs Intel Core 12th Gen

Introduction

Earlier this month, AMD announced their new Ryzen 7000 Series desktop processors along with the LGA socket AM5 platform. These processors are marketed as having substantially better performance for content creation applications in part due to their "Zen 4" architecture, as well as support for new technologies like DDR5 memory.

For Premiere Pro, AMD has had to fight an upward battle due to the Quick Sync technology found on most of Intel's Core line of processors. Quick Sync is one of two ways that Premiere Pro is able to perform hardware decoding of H.264 and HEVC media, which often makes the difference between a good, and a terrible, editing experience. Adobe did recently add the ability to use an NVIDIA or AMD GPU to provide similar functionality, but Quick Sync tends to give greater performance and supports a wider range of codec settings.

However, one of the new features of the AMD Ryzen 7000 Series is the addition of an integrated GPU. This will likely only be a small footnote in most reviews, but for Premiere Pro it could end up being a big deal. If the Ryzen iGPU is able to offer the same capabilities and performance as Quick Sync, that would remove the one solid advantage Intel holds for anyone working with H.264 and HEVC media.

Because of this, we are going to have to look at the Ryzen 7000 series processors in two ways: pure processing performance in Premiere Pro, and how well the iGPU is able to handle hardware decoding and encoding.

In this article, we will primarily be using our PugetBench for Premiere Pro 0.95.3 benchmark paired with Premiere Pro 22.6.2 to examine the performance of the new AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs. As a comparison, we will be including the previous generation AMD Ryzen 5000 Series, as well as their primary competition – the Intel Core 12th Gen processors. While we are including most of the primary models from each of these product lines, note that we are skipping the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D which features AMD's 3D V-Cache Technology. We have looked at this model in past articles, and found that for content creation, it is either on par or slower than the normal Ryzen 7 5800X model.

If you want to read more about the new AMD Ryzen 7000 Series and what sets them apart from the previous generation, we recommend checking out our main AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Processors Content Creation Review article. That post includes more detailed information on the CPU specifications, testing results for a range of other applications including Photoshop, After Effects, Lightroom Classic, and Unreal Engine; as well as all the test setup details for both the hardware and software used in our testing.

Raw Benchmark Data

While our benchmark presents various scores based on the performance of each test, we also like to provide individual results for you to examine. If there is a specific task that is a hindrance to your workflow, examining the raw results for that task is going to be much more applicable than the scores that our benchmark calculated.

Feel free to skip to the next sections for our analysis of these results to get a wider view of how each configuration performs.

AMD Ryzen 7000 vs Intel Core 12th Gen for Premiere Pro

To start off our analysis, we wanted to look at how the new Ryzen 7000 series compares to the Intel Core 12th Gen processors. The MSRP pricing for Intel and AMD don't exactly match, but in most cases, the comparisons we are making in the chart above are looking at CPUs that have an MSRP within $40 of each other. We have a full breakdown of the MSRP of each of these CPUs in our main AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Processors Content Creation Review article if you want to get into the specifics.

At first glance, things don't look that great for AMD. In terms of the Extended Overall Score from our benchmark, the Intel Core 12th Gen CPUs are anywhere from ~20% faster at the top end, to ~40% faster on the lower-end models. What you don't see from this one number is that this is a bit skewed of a score due to just how much faster the Intel CPUs are when running the 4K H.264 and 8K HEVC sets of tests.

If we break it down by codec type, Intel has a major advantage for longGOP codecs like H.264 and HEVC. On the other hand, in the ProRes tests AMD and Intel are pretty much on par, and AMD takes a sizable lead for RAW codecs like RED. You can see this in chart #2, where the Ryzen 9 7950X was in some cases 42% faster than the Intel Core i9 12900KS and the Ryzen 9 7900X was just over 20% faster than the Core i9 12900K. The lower-end 7700X and 7600X, however, were not significantly faster than their Intel Core counterparts.

AMD Ryzen 7000 vs AMD Ryzen 5000 for Premiere Pro

In the previous section, we saw that the new AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors continue to struggle against Intel's 12th Gen models, although there are certainly some workflows where AMD takes a strong lead. What it doesn't show is just how much of an improvement that is for AMD over the previous generation.

As you can see in the chart above, AMD has made some decent strides with the 7000 Series, although the payoff isn't quite as much as it is in other applications like Photoshop or After Effects. Most of the models are showing a 12-13% performance gain over the last generation, with the Ryzen 9 7900X showing slightly less at 5%.

Just like we saw in the AMD vs Intel results, the biggest gains came from RED media, although ProRes also got a solid bump in performance. The biggest thing holding the Ryzen 7000 back is H.264 and HEVC media, which is a bit of a disappointment since that is exactly what we were hoping the iGPU would be able to help with. Unfortunately, we didn't have a great experience trying to use the iGPU to aid in hardware decoding.

Ryzen 7000 iGPU – Does it Work for Hardware Decoding and Encoding?

As we've talked about a few times already, we had high hopes that the iGPU included on the Ryzen 7000 series would be able to function similarly to Quick Sync on the Intel Core processors. By itself, Quick Sync has long been one of the main reasons we tend to lead with Intel over AMD for the majority of users that work with H.264 and HEVC media. Unfortunately, we had some major GPU driver issues that prevented us from being able to use the AMD iGPU for decoding.

To be clear, we fully expect the issues we saw to be fixed fairly quickly with an updated AMD GPU driver. And, to give AMD credit, hardware encoding appears to be working just fine, although we want to wait until all the issues are fixed before doing any performance testing.

But, with what we had available pre-launch, we were unable to get hardware decoding reliably working with the Ryzen 7000's integrated GPU. We could select it as an option for hardware decoding in Premiere Pro's preferences, and usually were able to play a few clips successfully, but after roughly a minute all the clips in our project switched to showing "Media pending" and stayed that way until we restarted Premiere Pro.

We will note that this issue did not adversely affect the benchmark results shown in this article. Performance was identical with and without the iGPU enabled, so the decoding and encoding issues did not lower the performance. Once the iGPU is fixed, it could increase performance, but Premiere Pro was good about using the NVIDIA decoder/encoder rather than trying to use the iGPU.

We saw similar issues in our DaVinci Resolve Studio testing, which is why we are fairly confident that this is an underlying driver issue rather than a problem with Premiere Pro. Hopefully, we will get a fix soon, as it is entirely possible that having the iGPU available and working could increase the AMD's performance when using LongGOP codecs like H.264 and HEVC.

How well do the AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs perform in Premiere Pro?

While there are certain workflows that the new AMD Ryzen 7000 processors excel at (namely working with RAW footage), most users looking for a CPU in this price range are going to be working with a lot of H.264 or HEVC media. And unfortunately for AMD, Intel Core 12th Gen CPUs with their Quick Sync technology are going to be a stronger choice for those kinds of workflows. In fact, even though the Ryzen 7950X is as much as 40% faster than the Core i9 12900KS with RED footage, the Intel CPU is so much faster for H.264 and HEVC that the 12900KS ended up scoring 18% higher overall in our benchmark.

We had hopes that the integrated GPU found on the Ryzen 7000 series would be able to function similarly to Quick Sync and remove Intel's built-in advantage for video editing, but unfortunately it was broken during our testing so that wasn't something we could examine. Hopefully, AMD will fix the issue soon so we can test the iGPU decoding/encoding performance, but as it stands today, Intel CPUs with Quick Sync are a hard combination to beat for anyone working with H.264/HEVC media.

If you don't work with this kind of media, however, the AMD Ryzen 7000 series is about on par with the Intel Core 12th Gen for intraframe codecs like ProRes, while the 7900X and 7950X can be as much as 20-40% faster for RAW codecs like RED. Because of this, the choice between AMD Ryzen and Intel Core largely breaks down into three categories based on the codecs you are most likely to use:

• LongGOP (H.264/HEVC) – Intel Core with Quick Sync is the strong option (unless you are using a flavor without hardware decoding support in Premiere Pro, in which case, it often will be bad no matter what hardware you have).
• Intraframe (ProRes, DNx, etc.) – AMD Ryzen and Intel Core should be very comparable at similar price points.
• RAW (RED, etc.) – AMD has a strong 20-40% performance lead with the Ryzen 7900X and 7950X respectively. Lower-end models will be comparable between Intel and AMD.

However, it is worth pointing out that Intel is expected to launch their new Core 13th Gen processors sometime later this year, with some sites like Tom's Hardware speculating that they could launch as early as October. We won't know how those upcoming Intel processors will perform until they are released, but given the short timeframe we are likely dealing with, it may be worth holding off on purchasing a Ryzen 7000 (or an Intel Core 12th Gen) processor for a little bit if you can. It will be hard for Intel to catch up to Ryzen for codecs like RED RAW, but 13th Gen will likely allow Intel to take the lead for intraframe codecs, and will only further their lead for longGOP codecs.

Update 9/27/2022: Intel has officially announced that the 13th Gen CPUs will be available in October.

Keep in mind that the benchmark results in this article are strictly for Premiere Pro and that performance will vary widely in different applications. If your workflow includes other software packages, we highly recommend checking out our AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Processors Content Creation Review article which includes results and links to in-depth testing for a range of other applications including After Effects, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and Unreal Engine.