Premiere Pro CC 2017 NVIDIA Titan Xp 12GB Performance

Introduction

A little less than a month ago, we looked at how the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB performs in Premiere Pro but apparently NVIDIA is not quite done with product launches. This time, we will be looking at the new Titan Xp which is not to be confused with the Titan X that many in the media called the Titan XP or the slightly older GTX Titan X. While the new Titan Xp may look similar to the Titan X (it even still says “Titan X” on the heatsink) on paper it should theoretically be around 11-12% faster.

To see exactly how much faster the new Titan Xp is in Premiere Pro compared to the Titan X, GTX 1080 Ti, and other GTX video cards from NVIDIA, we will be examining the following tasks:

1. Rendering previews (standard and VR projects)
2. Exporting to 4K H.264 (standard and VR projects)
3. Exporting to 4K DNxHR HQ
4. Exporting to 8K H.265

Can you spot the difference between the Titan Xp and Titan X?

If you would don’t like looking at charts and charts worth of data, we also have a summary of this article available on Youtube:

Test Setup

To see how the new Titan Xp performs in Premiere Pro, we will be testing with the following hardware:

Our base test platform uses some of the best hardware currently available for Premiere Pro including the Core i7 6950X CPU and 128GB of RAM. For storage, we will be using just a single Samsung 960 Pro 1TB NVMe drive. Be aware that based on our Premiere Pro Storage Optimization testing, we typically recommend having at minimum one separate SSD for your media cache and scratch files as that greatly improves the time it takes to import media, conform audio, and generate peak files. However, since we are not testing those tasks in this article (because they are not GPU accelerated) we opted to stick with a single drive to cut down on the number of hardware variables that might affect our results.

While we will not be testing any particularly low-end video cards, we will be comparing the Titan Xp to the GTX 1070, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, as well as the previous Titan X video card.

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 are 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. For this testing, we limited ourselves to only using built-in Premiere Pro effects such as Lumetri Color correction, text overlay, and cross dissolves.

Render Previews

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

Overall, the results were fairly consistent between our standard and VR footage testing, but there was some variation between the different codecs and resolutions we tested. This means that if you happen to primarily use one of the codecs we tested, we would recommend that you look at the individual result rather than the average.

With that said, the Titan Xp was certainly faster than the other cards – but on average it was only about 3% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti. For some this small performance gain might be worth it, but considering the Titan Xp is almost twice the cost of the GTX 1080 Ti it isn't all that impressive of a result.

Exporting

Since there is a huge variety of resolutions and codecs you might export to, it simply isn't feasible for us to test every possible combination. However, what we can do is to make sure we touch on the more common combinations as well as the ones we believe will be more widely used in the future. Because of this, we tested exporting to 1080p, 4K, and 8K using H.264, H.265, and DNxHR HQ codecs. Our source footage also uses a range of codecs including H.264, RAW TIFF, ProRes 422HQ, ProRes 4444, DNxHR HQ, and RED.

In addition, since VR has been gaining steam we also wanted to include exporting VR projects to 4K H.264 from a variety of source codecs.

Exporting is a bit interesting because the Titan Xp gave the biggest performance gains when exporting to 1080p – in this case it was just a bit over 6% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti. For the other export settings, we saw anywhere from a 4% performance gain over the GTX 1080 Ti to no performance gain.

If we look at the results as an overall average, the Titan Xp performed just 3% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti although it was 11% faster than the GTX 1080 and 16% faster than the GTX 1070.

Conclusion

Our Premiere Pro testing covers nearly 45 benchmarks with various footage resolutions and codecs, but we were hard pressed to find many cases where the Titan Xp is truly outstanding. At the very best, we saw a 12% performance gain over the GTX 1080 Ti but on average it was more like 3%. To sum up our testing:

In Premiere Pro 2017, the Titan Xp 12GB is about 3% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti, 4% faster than the Titan X, 12% faster than the GTX 1080, and 16% faster than the GTX 1070.

Compared to the previous Titan X, there is certainly a small performance improvement which is nice considering the cards are the same cost. However, given that the Titan Xp is about $500 more expensive than the GTX 1080 Ti we expected the Titan Xp to outperform the GTX 1080 Ti by a larger amount. Yes, the Titan Xp has one more GB of VRAM but if the difference between 11GB and 12GB is that important you should probably be considering the Quadro P5000 or P6000 which have 16GB or 24GB of VRAM respectively.

Should you use the Titan Xp for Premiere Pro? If you have any sort of a budget we would recommend you stick with the GTX 1080 Ti and spend the cost savings on a dedicated media cache & scratch SSD or upgrading the amount of RAM in your system. But if you need the best possible performance regardless of cost, the Titan Xp is technically currently the king of performance in Premiere Pro – if only by 3%.

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