Premiere Pro CC 2017 AMD Ryzen 7 1700X & 1800X Performance

Introduction

If you would rather skip over our analysis of the individual benchmarks, feel free to jump right to the conclusion section.

We also have a number of other articles looking at the performance of the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X & 1800X CPUs in other applications including:

• Photoshop
• Lightroom
• SOLIDWORKS

Test Setup

To see how the new AMD Ryzen CPUs perform in Premiere Pro, we will be testing with the following hardware:

These test configurations include three different platforms along with five different CPU models. For Premiere Pro, we would typically recommend one of the “High End” Intel CPUs since Premiere Pro can make effective use of higher number of cores. With their eight CPU cores, this puts Ryzen right in the sweet spot for Premiere Pro.

Most of the media we will be using is available from the Sample R3D Files and were transcoded to the various codecs we wanted to test.

To test exporting and rendering previews we used a moderately complex timeline involving multiple clips, lumetri color correction, multicam footage, and some other effects like a logo overlay, gaussian blur and cross dissolves. If you want a more in-depth look at what our timelines look like, we recorded a short video explaining our test process:

Our 4K VR testing was performed using the “Sample 1 – Ring road motorbike ride” footage from the Autopano Video Benchmarking page. We tested using both some built-in Premiere Pro effects (lumetri color correction, text overlay, and cross dissolve) as well as using the Mettle Skybox 360 VR Tools and Skybox 360/VR Transitions plug-ins to apply a number of effects such as Denoise, Rotate Sphere, Sharpen, and Iris Wipe. We typically try to avoid using plug-ins in our testing but since Premiere Pro only has basic support for VR at the moment we felt it made sense to also look at the popular Mettle plug-in for VR projects.

Render Previews – Standard Footage

Rendering previews is something that you hope to never have to do since it interrupts your workflow, but if you do complex editing it is sometimes unavoidable. Because of this, being able to render previews as quickly as possible is often an important part of a Premiere Pro workstation.

Starting off with standard footage and projects, we found some very interesting results when rendering previews. There is quite a bit of back and forth between the various CPUs, but overall Ryzen is extremely competitive compared to the Intel CPUs. Interestingly, the 1800X was only about 2% slightly faster than the 1700X which is much less than we expected given the clock speed difference between the two CPUs.

Compared to the Intel CPUs, Ryzen was around 4-5% faster than the Core i7 7700K and a small 1-2% faster than the Core i7 6850K. Neither the 1700X or 1800X could match the i7 6900K, however, which was about 4-6% faster than the two Ryzen CPUs we tested.

Render Previews – VR Footage

VR might not be here quite yet, but it is certainly gaining in popularity so we wanted to include it in our testing. Since it is not widespread, however, we opted to keep the results separate from our testing with standard footage. Note that we opted to test both with the built-in effects and transitions along with using the Mettle plug-in. We typically avoid testing plug-ins since it opens up a huge amount of potential testing, but in the case of VR we thought it was prudent to include some testing with Mettle as that is one of the most popular plug-ins for editing VR footage.

Overall, Ryzen was decently faster than the Core i7 7700K and pretty much matched or was a bit faster than the slightly more expensive Core i7 6850K. Just like in the previous section, Ryzen fell behind compared to the Core i7 6900K with the 1700X coming in at about 8% slower and the 1800X 6% slower than the 6900K.

Export to 1080p H.264

1080p H.264 might be replaced with 4K at some point, but for now it is still among the most popular resolutions and codecs. Unlike the 4K and 8K export testing we will be doing in later sections, we opted to stick with only 4K source footage rather than going all the way up to 6K or 8K since if you working with 8K footage you probably are not going to be terribly concerned with 1080p exporting performance.

When exporting to 1080P H.264, we found that Ryzen was on average a bit faster than the Core i7 7700K – although this was mostly due to the great performance with 4K RED footage. If you were to take out that result, the 1800X was actually about 2.4% slower than the 7700K while the 1700X was about 4% slower.

Compared to the "High End" Intel CPUs, the Ryzen CPUs were about 5% slower than the i7 6850K but again the RED 4K test skews things for the better. If we ignore that one test, Ryzen was actually about 8-9% slower than the i7 6850K. Looking at the i7 6900K, Ryzen took about 8-9% longer to export to 1080p H.264 which incidentally is about the same as what we saw with the 6850K when we excluded the RED 4K test.

Export to 4K H.264

With the rise of 4K, we opted to spend a good portion of our testing on exporting to 4K with a wide range of source resolutions and codecs. In addition, while we will focus on exporting to 4K H.264 in this section, we will also look at 4K H.264 for VR as well as 4K DNxHR HQ 8-bit in the next two sections.

When exporting to 4K H.264, the results for Ryzen are a bit odd. While the 1800X should be faster than the 1700X, the actual difference in this test was only a tiny .2%. This means that if performance when exporting to 4K H.264 is your primary concern, there is very little reason to use the more expensive 1800X over the Ryzen 7 1700X CPU.

Compared to the Intel Core i7 7700K, we found that Ryzen was around 4% faster on average. However, Ryzen fell behind the i7 6850K by a single percent and was about 10% slower than the i7 6900K.

Export to 4k H.264 VR

VR is gaining in popularity and one of the most commonly used resolution and codec is 4K H.264. As we stated in the "Render Previews – VR Footage" section, we tested using both the built-in effects and transitions as well as the Mettle plug-in. We typically avoid testing plug-ins since it opens up a huge amount of potential testing, but in the case of VR we thought it was prudent to include some testing with Mettle as that is one of the most popular plug-ins for editing VR footage.

Overall, Ryzen is in a bit of an odd position when exporting to 4K H.264 for VR content. It is quite a bit faster than the i7 7700K and even beats the i7 6850K by a healthy amount, but it is about 10-13% slower than the i7 6900K. For it's price point Ryzen performs great when exporting VR content, but if you are looking for better performance at a bit higher cost there are a lot of arguments for using the i7 6900K instead.

Export to 4K DNxHR HQ 8-bit

While H.264 might still be one of the most common codecs to export to, it is not a great choice if there is additional editing that needs to be done in a separate application. For that, DNxHR (and DNxHD) is a popular codec to use on PC video editing workstations.

Interestingly, exporting to 4K DNxHR HQ 8-bit is another time where we saw minimal performance difference between the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X CPUs. On average for this test, the Ryzen CPUs were about 9% faster than the i7 7700K and about 4% faster than the i7 6850K. They also did very well against the slightly more expensive 6900K coming in at just 2.5% slower.

Export to 8K H.265

8K is not common quite yet, but there are already a number of people working with 8K footage so we wanted to include at least some tests for exporting 8K footage to 8K H.265.

To be honest, even though we didn't include the 6950X in this round of testing (since it is so much more expensive than the Ryzen CPUs), if you are working with 8K projects you most likely have the budget for the Intel Core i7 6950X CPU as that is currently the fastest overall processor for Premiere Pro. Still, it is interesting to see that Ryzen is able to outperform both the i7 7700K and the i7 6850K by a good amount in this test. The Core i7 6900K is still around 9-14% faster, but for $500-600 cheaper Ryzen actually performs better than we expected for 8K projects.

Warp Stabilize 4K H.264

While exporting and rendering previews may be the easiest and most common thing to benchmark in Premiere Pro, we have received a lot of feedback that performing a warp stabilize is another task where high performance is important. We have found that the time it takes to complete a warp stabilize analysis does not vary much on the source codec, but the resolution does make a big difference so we will be testing with a 4K H.264 clip as well as a 8K ProRes 4444 clip in the next section.

Since warp stabilize is not well threaded (it does not take great advantage of multiple CPU cores), one method people use to decrease the time it takes to complete the analysis is to split their clip into multiple parts and analyze all of them at the same time. This essentially forces Premiere to make more effective use of all the CPU cores in your system. Since this is trick employed fairly commonly, we decided to not only time how long it takes to apply a warp stabilization effect to a single 10 second clip, but also how long it takes if the clip is split into 2, 4, 8, and 16 "sub-clips" that are all analyzed at the same time.

Warp Stabilization is a very interesting test, especially when we split the clip up into multiple sections. With just running the stabilization on a single clip, the 7700K is much faster than the Ryzen CPUs – although Ryzen does beat the i7 6850K and 6900K. However, if we divide the clip into two the 1800X actually becomes faster than the i7 6850K and 6900K but still lags behind the i7 7700K.

Once we divide the clip into 4 or more sections, the i7 6850K and especially the i7 6900K really start to pull away from the i7 7700K and the Ryzen CPUs. Interestingly, while the 1800X does end up being faster than the i7 7700K when you divide up the clip into this many parts, the difference is only by a few percent.

Warp Stabilize 8K ProRes4444

Oddly, while Ryzen did pretty decently in our 4K warp stabilization tests it did not fare so well when we increased the project resolution to 8K. This time, the i7 7700K was better than the Ryzen CPUs even when we split our test clip into multiple sections and ran the analysis on each section at the same time. Once again, the i7 6850K and i6 6900K CPUs were overall the best, at times finishing the stabilization more than twice as fast as the Ryzen CPUs.

One interesting thing to point out is that when we divided our clip into 16 sections, it actually took longer to perform the analysis with every single CPU we tested. This is probably due to the fact that we are somewhat taking a brute force approach to multi-threading so there is probably some thread scheduling issues going on. However, since this occurred on all the CPUs we tested and was not limited to just Intel or AMD we went ahead and left the result in.

Conclusion

After going through all our testing, Ryzen is in an interesting option for a Premiere Pro workstation. It is about 6-8% faster than the Core i7 7700K for exporting and rendering previews – although the i7 7700K can have a sizable advantage for warp stabilize depending on your project resolution and whether you are willing to split your clips into multiple sections. Since the 1700X and 1800X are about 20-30% more expensive than the i7 7700K, this means that if you are on a budget you have a bit of a choice between the i7 7700K and the new Ryzen CPUs. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that in a number of lightly threaded applications like Photoshop and Lightroom we found that Ryzen is quite a bit slower than the Core i7 7700K. So the choice is to pay 20-30% more for 6-8% faster export and preview generation times, but potentially much lower performance for warp stabilize and in other applications like Photoshop.

Compared to the 6-8 core "High End" Intel CPUs, the two Ryzen CPUs we tested fared pretty well. They should be pretty much on par with the Core i7 6850K for exporting and rendering previews (for about $100-200 cheaper as well), but are on average around 30% slower for warp stabilize. If you use warp stabilize in your projects, that is likely going to be the tipping point where you should definitely use a i7 6850K over the Ryzen CPUs.

Compared to the Intel Core i7 6900K (which is about $500-600 more expensive than Ryzen), you are looking at about 7-10% lower performance for exporting and rendering previews. Once again, warp stabilization is heavily in Intel's favor with the 6900K clocking in at about 45-50% faster than Ryzen.

Overall, our take on Ryzen for Premiere Pro is that while it presents some interesting opportunities and can be competitive with Intel for many tasks, it doesn't quite earn a place on our Premiere Pro recommended systems. This isn't to say that a Ryzen workstation might not be the right fit for you, but there are a couple of reasons that (right now) it just barely misses the mark for us:

1. If you are on a tight budget, the Intel Core i7 7700K is likely a better choice for most users. While the 7700K is a little slower than Ryzen for some tasks in Premiere Pro, but it is much faster for other tasks (like warp stabilize) and in applications like Photoshop. The i7 7700K is a bit cheaper as well which frees up some of your budget for more RAM, larger storage, etc.
2. For higher-end workstations, the 6900K (and the 6950X for that matter) is a good amount faster than the Ryzen CPUs. In addition, the 64GB RAM limitation of the Ryzen platform is a concern as 64GB is becoming much more commonplace in our Premiere Pro workstations. With 4K and VR projects gaining steam, not having the room for future RAM expansion is not ideal.

While these compromises keep Ryzen from earning a spot in our Premiere Pro configurations, this is certainly a big step forward for AMD and we will be watching them much more closely in the future. It is exciting to have more competition and options, and for the first time in a long time, we can imagine a future where AMD will be back in our product line – even if that day isn't today.