Adobe Premiere Pro – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance

Introduction

Over the last three months, NVIDIA has been doing a rolling launch of their new GeForce RTX 30 Series video cards, culminating in the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB which just recently hit the market. While gaming is almost always a major focus during these launches, professional applications like Premiere Pro are becoming increasingly important for NVIDIA's GeForce line of cards.

This is especially true for Premiere Pro as Adobe has been adding more and more GPU-accelerated effects and features over the last few years. Most of these tend to work better with NVIDIA GPUs over AMD, and even with AMD's latest Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT GPUs, NVIDIA has continued to maintain a strong lead in Premiere Pro. However, the RTX 3060 Ti is the lowest-cost 30 series card released to date, so it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA performs at this lower price point.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD Radeon RX Graphics Cards product pages. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

While specs rarely line up with real-world performance, the biggest thing to note is that the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti is at the bottom end of the product stack from NVIDIA and has the same exact MSRP as the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. So, from a price-to-performance standpoint, that will be the card to beat for NVIDIA.

Note that the current supply is so poor that you will be lucky to find many of these cards for anywhere near the MSRP. However, we typically use the MSRP as a baseline for price in order to rule out fluctuations due to different brands, sales, and scarcity. The actual cost you will likely need to pay for either an AMD or NVIDIA card is likely to be quite a bit different, so keep that in mind as you read this article.

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of December 1st, 2020

To test each GPU, we will be using the fastest platform currently available for Premiere Pro – most notably the AMD Threadripper 3970X. Since Premiere Pro utilizes the CPU so heavily, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at their fullest potential.

For the testing itself, we will be using the "Standard" preset of our PugetBench for Premiere Pro benchmark. This tests a number of different codec types (H.264, ProRes 422, and RED RAW), but also includes a dedicated "Heavy GPU Effects" test that is meant to put as much load on the GPU as possible while still staying within the realm of what someone might actually do in the real world. If you wish to run our benchmark yourself, you can download the benchmark and compare your results to thousands of user-submitted results in our PugetBench database.

Raw Benchmark Results

While we are going to go through our analysis of the testing in the next section, we always like to provide the raw results for those that want to dig into the details. If there is a specific task you tend to perform in your workflow, examining the raw results is going to be much more applicable than our more general analysis.

Overall Premiere Pro Performance Analysis

In applications like Premiere Pro where the GPU is secondary to the CPU, many reviewers like to focus on extreme situations that heavily load the GPU. However, we first want to start off by looking at the overall performance we saw from our Premiere Pro benchmark with each GPU in order to show what most users would likely experience in their day-to-day work.

Looking at the overall performance, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti does very well, beating the AMD Radeon 5700 XT by about 7% and tying with the more expensive Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT.

Compared to the GeForce RTX 3070, it is only about 5% slower, which for a 20% lower MSRP is more than acceptable in our eyes. Inf act, even the significantly more expensive RTX 3080 and 3090 cards are only about 10% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti.

Keep in mind that the scores shown in the charts above include quite a few tests that are heavily CPU limited. Playing or exporting ProRes footage does not utilize the GPU, and neither does our dedicated CPU Effects test. This is still a fairly good indication of what the average Premiere Pro user may experience overall, but we can dive into specific situations where a more powerful GPU should net you more significant performance gains.

Exporting to H.264 (GPU Encoding) Analysis

The chart above is not an official part of our Premiere Pro benchmark at the moment, but is a calculated score from the H.264 export tests. As we showed in our recent Premiere Pro 14.2 H.264/H.265 Hardware Encoding Performance article, the amount of speedup you can see by utilizing the recently added hardware encoding feature varies greatly depending on your source media and export settings. In this case, we are exporting 4K media to UHD H.264 40mbps, which, coincidentally, is where we saw the largest performance gains.

Here, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti again does very well – essentially matching the RTX 3070 and previous generation RTX 2080 Ti. NVIDIA in general has a strong lead for hardware encoding, which allows the RTX 3060 Ti to outpace the Radeon 5700 XT by a large 32% and even beat the Radeon 6800 XT by just over 20%.

GPU Score Analysis

Our heavy GPU effects test looks at live playback and export performance with sequences that have a large number of GPU-accelerated effects including Lumetri Color, Ultra Key, Sharpen, Gaussian Blur, Basic 3D, Directional Blur, VR Digital Glitch, and VR De-Noise. Because it is designed to maximize the load on the GPU and minimize the load on the rest of the system, this should be close to the maximum possible performance difference you will ever experience between different GPUs in Premiere Pro.

In these tests, the RTX 3060 Ti again takes a large lead over the Radeon 5700 XT, beating it by about 41%. This also puts it roughly on par with the Radeon 6800, and only slightly behind the Radeon 6800 XT. Compared to the higher-end NVIDIA GPUs, the RTX 3070 is just 5% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RTX 3080 and 3090 are a larger 21% and 30% faster respectively.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB perform in Premiere Pro?

Overall, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a very solid card for Premiere Pro and in some cases can be up to 41% faster than the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. That puts it about on par with the significantly more expensive AMD Radeon 6800, and only a small 5% slower than the NVIDIA RTX 3070. This makes it an excellent option for Premiere Pro users that are operating on a limited budget.

While it certainly can't keep up with the top-tier NVIDIA GPUs like the RTX 3080 and 3090, for many users the difference is not actually as large as you might expect. It is only in projects with a large number of GPU accelerated effects – or particularly heavy effects like noise reduction – where the higher power of the RTX 3080/3090 will give significantly higher performance.

However, always keep in mind that performance is only part of the equation; you also need to ensure that you have enough VRAM (video memory) for the projects you will be working on. Luckily, the RTX 3060 Ti has 8GB of VRAM which makes it more than enough for most 4K timelines. But, if you plan on working with 8K media/timelines, you will likely want to upgrade to the RTX 3080 simply for the 10GB of VRAM that is available on that GPU.

As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for Premiere Pro. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by "Video Card") for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.