Adobe Premiere Pro – AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Performance

Introduction

For the last part of 2020, both NVIDIA and AMD have been slowly releasing a number of new GPUs. One of the most recent was the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB which officially launched on December 8th, but due to extremely tight supply, we have not been able to get our hands on one to test until just recently. In fact, we still have not been able to purchase a card ourselves, but our friends at Linus Media Group were able to loan us a card so we could perform our testing.

While gaming is almost always a major focus during these GPU launches, professional applications like Premiere Pro are becoming more and more important. In fact, if you view the product page for the 6900 XT, you will note that they are starting to include Content Creation performance from benchmarks like our very own "PugetBench for Premiere Pro"!

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 AMD Radeon 6900 XT 16GB is at the top of the product stack from AMD and has an MSRP that is $300 higher than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB, or $500 lower than the GeForce RTX 3090 24GB. Based on price alone, this means that we (hopefully) will see better performance from the 6900 XT than the RTX 3080, although there are certainly other factors to consider such as the larger VRAM capacity.

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, it is interesting to see that the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB does not score much higher than either the Radeon 6800 or 6800 XT. In fact, the performance is only about on par with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or about 8% slower than the RTX 3080.

However, 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, NVIDIA tends to have a solid performance advantage, which results in even the lowest-end NVIDIA GPU we tested (the RTX 3060 Ti) out-performing the Radeon 6900 XT by a solid 15%. The performance difference is even larger if you compare it to the RTX 3080 which is just over 25% faster than the Radeon 6900 XT when exporting to H.264.

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 Radeon 6900 XT does better than before, although it still only manages to sneak past the RTX 3070 (which is half the cost) by a very slim margin. Compared to the higher-end NVIDIA GeForce cards, the RTX 3080 (which is $300 less expensive), is about 13% faster than the 6900 XT, while the RTX 3090 (which is $500 more expensive than the 6900 XT) is about 21% faster.

How well does the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT perform in Premiere Pro?

While the AMD Radeon 6000 series cards are a major improvement over the previous generation, NVIDIA simply has too large of a lead for AMD to be able to catch up. In addition, there isn't much of a performance difference between the $579 Radeon 6800 and the $999 Radeon 6900 XT in Premiere Pro as the 6900 XT scored at most just 7% higher than the 6800. All of this combines to make the Radeon 6900 XT a fairly lackluster option for Premiere Pro. In the GPU portion of our benchmark, the Radeon 6900 XT is only able to match the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (even though the RTX 3070 is almost exactly half the cost) and falls behind the RTX 3080 by about 12%.

If you regularly export to H.264 or HEVC codecs using hardware encoding, the performance difference is even more in NVIDIA's favor. For exporting, even the RTX 3060 Ti beats the Radeon 6900 XT by a solid 15% while the RTX 3080 is a hair over 25% faster. All this means is that no matter how you slice it, NVIDIA cards are simply faster for Premiere Pro right now.

The Radeon 6000 series do offer the advantage of being able to get 16GB of VRAM at a relatively affordable price, although that amount of VRAM is typically only going to be a factor if you are working with 8K timelines in Premiere Pro. And with those kinds of projects, the RTX 3080 10GB is usually going to a better choice since it gives you enough VRAM for 8K editing while also being significantly faster in Premiere Pro than the Radeon 6800/6900 cards.

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.