Adobe Premiere Pro - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Written on December 30, 2020 by Matt BachTL;DR: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB performance 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.
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:
| VRAM | Cores | Boost Clock | Power | MSRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon 5700X | 8GB | 2,560 | 1.9 GHz | 225W | $399 |
| RTX 3060 Ti | 8GB | 4,864 | 1.67 GHz | 200W | $399 |
| RTX 3070 | 8GB | 5,888 | 1.70 GHz | 220W | $499 |
| Radeon 6800 | 16GB | 3,840 | 2.1 GHz | 250W | $579 |
| Radeon 6800 XT | 16GB | 4,608 | 2.25 GHz | 300W | $649 |
| RTX 3080 | 10GB | 8,704 | 1.71 GHz | 320W | $699 |
| RTX 3090 | 24GB | 10,496 | 1.73 GHz | 350W | $1,499 |
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.
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Test Setup
Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:
| Test Platform | |
| CPU | AMD TR 3970X 32 Core |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS PRO WIFI |
| RAM | 4x Crucial DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total) |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 OC 10GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT 16GB AMD Radeon RX 6800 16GB AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB |
| Hard Drive | Samsung 960 Pro 1TB |
| Software | Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (Ver. 2009) Premiere Pro 2020 (Ver. 14.6) PugetBench for Premiere Pro (Ver. 0.92) |
*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.
Premiere Pro Workstations
Puget Systems offers a range of poweful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.
Labs Consultation Service
Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.
Thank you for posting this! Great info! I always felt "live playback" should play a bigger part in the scoring. But regardless, this info is great. Looking at the live playback score specifically for H264 Media it appears the AMD GPU's are the "winners" vs NVIDIA's similar priced options. So if I mostly edit Sony A7S3 footage using the H264 and H265 variants, with occasional multicam, then would you suggest AMD for the best playback performance...in that price range?
Combining everything into an "Overall Score" is never going to be perfect for everyone, but that is why we always include the "Live Playback" and "Export" scores in the article, plus all the raw results for those that really want to dive into things. To be honest, even with everything we test in our benchmarks, it isn't going to be perfectly accurate for everyone since there is such a wide range of codecs and resolutions people work with - not to mention their specific workflow. So these results are really just ballpark numbers for Premiere Pro as a whole. To get more accurate numbers for each individual user, you really have to test with the exact media and projects (which is actually a service we are starting to offer to our customers).
As for your specific question about playback for H.264/5, AMD does seem to have a lead for multicam playback. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure why - maybe the AMD GPUs have more decoding chips built-in compared to NVIDIA? NVIDIA has a great matrix of what their cards support (https://developer.nvidia.co..., but I haven't been able to find anything from AMD about that.
One warning I will give you is that AMD is nowhere near as stable on the driver side of things. We had to do a bit of fighting to get everything running right, so if you do end up going with AMD, just be aware that you are likely at a higher risk of having to deal with annoying driver bugs/instability.
Hmmm. That's what I've heard (about AMD stability) but was hoping this batch was different I guess.
And you're right that every workflow is different.
I got a 5950x and am waiting to pair it with a GPU. I have access to a 6800 (non-XT) but was waiting for the unicorn (the 3080) to be available but that's almost impossible. Those multicam scores are really the first thing to make me go "Hmmmm, maybe I should forget the Nvidia and go AMD". We do edit multicam with H264 10bit A7siii footage quite a bit.
You have to be extra careful as well because depending on the flavor of H.264, hardware decoding might not be supported. I think the main place you can get into trouble is if you are using 4:4:4 where most GPUs don't have decoding support. I don't believe the A7siii supports that, but performance in general can change quite a bit depending on whether it is 8 or 10 bit as well. If it were me, I would stick with NVIDIA to be honest. AMD is making improvements on the stability side, but to me, stability is king over performance.
Couldn't agree more on that last comment. Thanks. Guess I'll just hope to get lucky and get an NVIDIA...somehow. (and not on ebay, ugh)
If it helps, supply on our end is getting much better - to the point that we have enough cards to fulfill all orders right now. Distribution is different for system integrators like us versus end users, but hopefully it is a sign that it will soon get better for you to be able to find an RYT 3080.
Matt - When you do multicam, how many cameras/angles are you working with?
Currently, it is 4 streams across the board. I plan on turning the ProRes tests up to 6 streams because it is too easy with the next benchmark update though.
I do want to check these results with a Quadro card though. From my understanding, GeForce is locked to one decode stream, while Quadro I believe is unlocked to allow for multiple streams. Not sure how that really works in practice, but definitely something I want to look into.
Unless there is a driver/optimization problem, that live playback score for multicam is a deal breaker for Nvidia cards, most people edit 8 bit h.264 files, event videographers do multicam edits at 2x or 3x speed.
This has to be addressed in an update and a follow-up article.
As for Amd driver instability i can't confirm any problems except lack of initial support on some very new plugins but eventually opencl gets supported too, i use an rx480 for a few years and had no problems with premiere pro.
I really wanted to upgrade to rtx 3060 ti but that multicam score is strange.
LE
What is the instability problem, it hangs ? it doesn't work ? i hear about all this problems but something specific would be of help to know why we must avoid Amd at all costs, i use an Amd card and delivered hundreds of projects and had no problem.
LE 2
I downloaded pugetbench and tested the multicam part on rx480 and 2700x cpu, it can do 4k h.264 60fps up to 2 cameras at any resolution, once you have 3 or more it's impossible to edit even if you lower to half resolution or 1/8, you get 6-7 fps.
If i disable GPU decoding it can do on my 2700x 3 cameras at 1/4 resolution.
For those hunting for a card to accelerate your R5/R6/A7sIII/C70 H265 4:2:2 10 bit footage, keep waiting - Nvidia doesn't support those, only 4:2:0 and 4:4:4. Fingers crossed that could be fixed with a driver update, but it might take until the 4000 line before we get that :(