Adobe Premiere Pro – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti & 3080 Ti Performance

Introduction

NVIDIA has a long history of releasing "Ti" variants of their products which in most cases are simply slight upgrades to the base model. With the recent launch of the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti, NVIDIA is continuing this trend. Compared to the base RTX 3070, the RTX 3070 Ti has the same amount of VRAM (8GB) but has a few more CUDA cores that run at a slightly higher frequency. The RTX 3080, on the other hand, has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080 (12GB versus 10GB) and 18% more CUDA cores, although the maximum boost clock is a bit lower. In fact, in terms of performance, the RTX 3080 Ti should be closer to the RTX 3090 than it is to the RTX 3080.

In recent years, Adobe has been adding more and more GPU acceleration to Premiere Pro – including GPU-based hardware decoding and encoding for H.264 and HEVC media – which has made the video card an increasingly important part of a Premiere Pro workstation. However, many workflows often don't see a benefit going above a mid-range GPU, so the question is whether the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti will be able to provide a tangible benefit for Premiere Pro users.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

As we noted earlier, the RTX 3070 Ti is simply a slightly more powerful version of the RTX 3070 and is priced right in between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. The RTX 3080 Ti, on the other hand, has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080, and close to the same CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3080, or $300 less than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need high GPU performance, but not necessarily the large 24GB of VRAM that is found on the RTX 3090.

One concern we have is that the RTX 3080 Ti is a 350W card – just like the RTX 3090 – but uses a 2-slot cooler that is essentially the same as what is on the lower wattage RTX 3080. In our testing, this makes it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.

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 June 8th, 2021

To test each GPU, we will be using the fastest platform currently available for Premiere Pro – most notably the AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX. Since Premiere Pro utilizes the CPU so heavily, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at its fullest potential.

For the testing itself, we will be using our PugetBench for Premiere Pro benchmark. This tests a number of different codecs and includes a dedicated "GPU Stress" 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 Score, it is interesting that we see two very clear bands of performance with the RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, and 3070 performing about the same as each other, while the RTX 3080, 3080 Ti, and 3090 all perform about 10% higher. And right in between is the new RTX 3070 Ti coming in at about 6% faster than the RTX 3070.

However, while the Overall Score is a great way to get a sense of general performance in Premiere Pro, 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.

GPU Score Analysis

Our GPU Score includes the performance for our "4K Heavy GPU Effects" sequences which 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. In addition, since H.264 hardware encoding is now done by default on the GPU, the latest version of our Premiere Pro benchmark also includes all the H.264 export tests within the GPU score.

In this test, both the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti performed right where we expected. Starting with the RTX 3070 Ti, it is about 6% faster than the RTX 3070 in this test, which is not at all a bad return on investment considering it only has a $100 higher MSRP.

The RTX 3080 Ti doesn't provide as much of a performance improvement as the RTX 3070 Ti, only coming in at about 4% faster than the RTX 3080 in this test. That isn't much for the $500 higher price tag, but keep in mind that it also has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080, and essentially performs on par with the more expensive RTX 3090. So, for many higher-end Premiere Pro users, the RTX 3080 Ti can be a terrific choice as the extra VRAM can make a big difference in some workflows.

How well do the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti & RTX 3080 Ti perform in Premiere Pro?

Overall, both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti are terrific GPUs for Premiere Pro. For only a small $100 higher MSRP, the RTX 3070 Ti is a solid 6% faster than the RTX 3070. The RTX 3080 Ti is a smaller 4% faster than the RTX 3080 – or roughly on par with the more expensive RTX 3090 – but the 12GB of VRAM also makes it a more comfortable choice over the RTX 3080 10GB if you work with 8K footage since 10GB can be a bit tight depending on what effects you will be using.

The price of the RTX 3080 Ti is certainly not cheap, however, and many users may opt to pay the extra $300 to go straight up to the RTX 3090 which has twice the VRAM (24GB vs 12GB). 12GB of VRAM should be plenty for even 8K workflows, but with cameras coming out that are able to record higher and higher resolutions every year, skipping the RTX 3080 Ti 12GB and going with the top-of-the-line RTX 3090 24GB in order to help future-proof your system is not a terrible idea if you have the budget for it.

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 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.