[SOLVED] For Video Editing , What is the right balance between number of cores and better GPU

[nofanneeded]

Okay I will keep it simple ,

Lets say you want to spend Total of ~$2100 for CPU + GPU for Video Editing PC (ONLY NO GAMING)

What is the right balance ?

1- Spend $1400 on 24 cores Thread Ripper 3960X , AND $700 for RTX 3080 ,

OR

2- Spend $600 on i9-10900K 10 corses CPU , AND $1500 for RTX 3090

The rest of the system will be the same , 128GB RAM , 2 TB NVME SSD , 10TB HDD .

Please Experts replies only from people who render movies using 4K resolution .

 

[PCWarrior]

Just for video editing? Like just Premiere Pro, MAGIX Vegas Pro and DaVinci Resolve? No advanced VFX, motion graphics, 3D rendering, animation in your workflow? Anyway here is an interesting Jayztwocents video about Premiere Pro and GPU acceleration. Watch the entire video. It might surprise you. You may also want to take a look at the following Techgage article here and Puget Systems here.

I think the most balanced system would be:
CPU: 10980XE ($1000 if you can find it for MSRP - in the US you cannot, in many other countries you can). And when you OC the 10980Xe is a chart topper. (It is a chart topper even in stock on Magix Vegas Pro look at Techgage's review).

Motherboard: X299 MSI creator ($540) Loaded with features and X299 (3rd generation) is extremely mature.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7km2cGVVWTs


GPU: RTX 3080 ($760).

Total cost for the three parts is ~$2300 and it will outperform both of your configurations. And if your budget for CPU+GPU is $2100 it is like you only pay $200 for the motherboard which is a bargain for such a super high-end board.

 

[nofanneeded]

Just for video editing? Like just Premiere Pro, MAGIX Vegas Pro and DaVinci Resolve? No advanced VFX, motion graphics, 3D rendering, animation in your workflow? Anyway here is an interesting Jayztwocents video about Premiere Pro and GPU acceleration. Watch the entire video. It might surprise you. You may also want to take a look at the following Techgage article here and Puget Systems here.

I think the most balanced system would be:
CPU: 10980XE ($1000 if you can find it for MSRP - in the US you cannot, in many other countries you can). And when you OC the 10980Xe is a chart topper. (It is a chart topper even in stock on Magix Vegas Pro look at Techgage's review).

Motherboard: X299 MSI creator ($540) Loaded with features and X299 (3rd generation) is extremely mature.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7km2cGVVWTs


GPU: RTX 3080 ($760).

Total cost for the three parts is ~$2300 and it will outperform both of your configurations. And if your budget for CPU+GPU is $2100 it is like you only pay $200 for the motherboard which is a bargain for such a super high-end board.

I wont get old intel X299 stuff , Also I wont overclock for Video Editing. and from the charts it seems that the 24 cores 3960X is faster than intel .

Also , you did not address anything about GPU+CPU balance that is the GPU taking some loads off the CPU in rendering ...

as for the motherboard , I dont mind paying $600 for it , not a big deal. I wont look for cheap Motherboards.

 

[PCWarrior]

I wont get old intel X299 stuff , Also I wont overclock for Video Editing. and from the charts it seems that the 24 cores 3960X is faster than intel .

You won't need to OC the 10980XE. You just load the motherboard's optimised defaults which remove the power limits and boosts the cpu to its turbo clocks indefinitely. And enable XMP. Nobody that buys an X299 board runs the cpu at the pure Intel spec with time limits in the turbo duration or with 2666 RAM as it was the case in the quoted benchmarks (Gamers Nexus and Techgage test with the pure Intel spec i.e. with power limits. Puget systems tests with power limits AND with 2666MHz RAM). This is not the out of the box configuration. It is also a good practice to manually reduce voltage (and set to adaptive voltage) as with auto voltage settings motherboards blast voltage to high levels (regardless of whether you use Intel pure spec or without power limits - that applies to AMD boards too). Or you can chose to see how far "stock volts" can get you (e.g. 1.15V Vcore see what frequency can get). Anyway with these settings the 10980XE is a chart topper. And when it loses it is by less than a 10% margin. With full OC to 4.9GHz it wins. And there are several mild very stable/safe overclocks in-between.

Also platform maturity is king when it comes to any professional environment workstation. You should know that. A lot of video editing companies buy EOL platforms for that very reason. Buy a platform where all kinks have been ironed out. They don't want to be a beta tester like AMD buyers of 1000-series Ryzen and X370 had been. And TRX40 keeps getting bios fixes.

Also , you did not address anything about GPU+CPU balance that is the GPU taking some loads off the CPU in rendering ...

I did. Watch Jayztwocents video and you will understand. In Adobe Premiere Pro the choice of a gpu is irrelevant. The GTX 660, the GTX 1050, the Vega 56, Vega 64, the GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and the GTX 1080Ti all yielded the same acceleration (they halved the rendering time compared to the cpu-only rendering). So the conclusion was to buy the fastest cpu and then pair it with ANY gpu to halve the times. For the Intel mainstream series like the 10900K, because it has an igpu, you can also choose to use quicksync which speeds up some other things in the encoding process even further on top of the acceleration from the discrete gpu.

as for the motherboard , I don't mind paying $600 for it , not a big deal. I wont look for cheap Motherboards.

You missed the point. The board I proposed is an ultra-high end $540 board with 10gbe, etc. I said that the total for all three components I suggested is $2300. Since you allocated $2100 for the cpu+gpu combo it is as if you get the board for only $200. That's because you only actually spent $1760 for the cpu+gpu combo instead of $2100. If you buy a cpu+gpu combo for 2100 and also spent another $600 on the motherboard you will spend $2700 total. Another $1000 for the other components ($550 for 128GB RAM (4x32GB), another $250 for 2TB NVME and $200 for 10TB HDD). Plus a further $500 for PSU, case and cooler. So total system cost is $4200 for the 3960X system and $3900 (actually $3840 if I opt for $700 3080 instead of an aftermarket one for $760) for the 10980Xe system. That's 7.7%-9.4% more expensive. Is it 7.7%-9.4% faster? Definitely not in terms of entire workflow (including working with the timeline to make the project). In terms of rendering alone that's insignificant most of the time. You can use that little extra time the 10980Xe might take longer to have have a slightly longer break or do or keep doing something else. You would be wholly inefficient if during the entire rendering process you just sat down waiting for it to complete.

 

[nofanneeded]

I did. Watch Jayztwocents video and you will understand. In Adobe Premiere Pro the choice of a gpu is irrelevant. The GTX 660, the GTX 1050, the Vega 56, Vega 64, the GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and the GTX 1080Ti all yielded the same acceleration (they halved the rendering time compared to the cpu-only rendering). So the conclusion was to buy the fastest cpu and then pair it with ANY gpu to halve the times. For the Intel mainstream series like the 10900K, because it has an igpu, you can also choose to use quicksync which speeds up some other things in the encoding process even further on top of the acceleration from the discrete gpu.

Yes Adobe Premiere pro , and Handbrake will be used most , and I will use the new H265 encoder.

I dont think that different Cuda cores count would give the same performance , something is missing here .

Also , that movie is old from 2017 almost four years now ... maybe things changed alot since then for GPU usage ..

but in anyways it seems right that I should get the better CPU First.

I will go for fastest CPU and choose RTX 3080 then ...

Still not convinced to get older x299 intel system though ..

 

[PCWarrior]

Yes Adobe Premiere pro , and Handbrake will be used most , and I will use the new H265 encoder.

I dont think that different Cuda cores count would give the same performance , something is missing here .

Also , that movie is old from 2017 almost four years now ... maybe things changed alot since then for GPU usage ..

Well that video is 3 years old (published on 31st August 2017), not "almost 4 years old". But anyway, yes of course, there has been one super major update regarding gpu utilisation in Adobe Premiere Pro. But it is not about rendering. It is about hardware-accelerated Encoding/Decoding. It was first introduced 2 years ago, and could utilise Intel quicksync during the export encoding to H.264 or H.265. Since May 2020, this functionality is also offered with Nvidia NVENC. You need a Pascal gpu or newer. But again, it doesn’t matter whether you use a GTX 1060 or an RTX 2080Ti. You will see the same speed-up over software (i.e. cpu-only) encoding. You typically get around 3x acceleration. The flipside with both NVENC and quicksync is that the export file is about 5% larger compared to software encoding and also sometimes the end video contains artifacts. As for the hardware decoding it helps greatly with timeline performance.

With regards to Handbrake the situation is similar. You can choose either NVENC to use your Nvidia gpu or Quicksync to use the Intel igpu for hardware encoding. No perceivable difference in quality between cpu-only, NVENC and quicksync. And your choice of Nvidia gpu doesn’t matter for this type of acceleration.

Still not convinced to get older x299 intel system though ..

Well this is not an old X299 board. It is one released in 2020 with the 10000 series X-series cpus in mind. Sure the chipset is the "same" as the original but the boards were upgraded to support the newer features that the cpus support natively (e.g. 48 direct PCIe lanes versus 44, default memory support from 2666 to 2933, different turbo strategies, option for onboard 2.5GBe with i218v Gbe LAN). And the recent X299 boards have much better VRM, better/higher OC RAM support and overall platfrom maturity. Everything just works. These are the same changes you get from Z270 to Z490. Sure you don't get PCIE4 support and not another round of next gen cpus. That's the only thing missing as far as I am concerned but if you are buying a 10900K or a 10980XE will you really upgrade to the next gen cpu or sit out a generation (by which point you will definitely be on a newer platform altogether probably with DDR5, etc)?

 

[VoxRationes]

Check out the articles concerning Premiere Pro on pugetsystems.com. They have great info on how hardware handles production software like PP. But as to your initial question: I would definitly go with the better CPU (TR) and a RTX 3080. Besides for rendering h.264/h.265, the GPU will also be relevant for a number of effects (those having the "acceletraed effects" icon). Still, the main bottleneck in rendering will the CPU (or storage). Go TR+3080 for fastest rendering in most codecs.