The current state of OpenCL in video production

[IAmAndre]

6 hours ago, MandicReally said:

I just ordered a Vega 56 for use with Premiere and After Effects. I absolutely had to replace my GTX 980 and got a Vega 56 for $229 refurb from Newegg. I'll report back this weekend hopefully with performance but it's what I could afford right now. 

 

Most test charts I could find weren't showing a massive enough difference with Nvidia offerings to justify the extra expense (for me currently). 

I'm getting mine this weekend. I guess we can compare our results.

[MandicReally]

Well I just wrapped up filming a video about my switch from a GTX980 to a Vega 56.  

I'll give you a quick and dirty response.  As of today with the latest AMD drivers and up to date Premiere Pro, the Vega 56 isn't much if any faster than my GTX 980 was.  

My benchmark was one of my own videos for YouTube.  10 minutes of 4k GH5 footage (4:2:2 10-bit, 150Mbps bitrate).  The timeline had motion graphics templates, Lumetri color on every clip (LUT and further color correction), a lot of jump cuts, a few transitions, and an After Effects Composition for one clip.  With the GTX 980 the video exported (using YouTube 4k export settings, no changes) in 15 minutes and 35 seconds.  With the Vega 56 and OpenCL it exported in 15 Minutes and 2 seconds.  I'd almost call that margin of error in difference.
 

I watched Task Manager and Premiere was not leveraging the GPU basically at all.  The highest percentage I saw was around 15% utilization.  

I'm considering switching to Davinci Resolve for some future projects and Vega performance is supposedly better there, so that is part of why I got it.  That said I may need to start considering a Quadro card in the not too distant future. 

[IAmAndre]

2 hours ago, MandicReally said:

As of today with the latest AMD drivers and up to date Premiere Pro, the Vega 56 isn't much if any faster than my GTX 980 was.  

I was already aware of this. JayzTwoCents made a video on the topic. When encoding a video with Premiere, it seems like any graphics card performs roughly the same. Now this could change depending on the actual task you are performing, but I believe that the results wouldn't be the same with After Effects.

 

 

[Thanatopsis]

I have not done a deep dive on Premiere's back end in a while but historically H264 is not offloaded to the GPU cores for rendering,  its offloaded the the strongest h264 encoder/decoder in the system whether thats the Nvidia Nvec subsystem, AMD's equivalent or Intels all depends on software optimization inside Premiere and hardware in your system.