Premiere Pro Accelerated Hardware Encoding: NVIDIA GPU
NVIDIA GPUs now have NVENC, which stands for NVIDIA’s Video ENCoder. It’s a dedicated piece of hardware found only on NVIDIA GTX and RTX graphics cards. NVENC is designed to accelerate video encoding by using the GPU hardware only to export H.264 and HVEC (H.265) video files. This frees up speed for the CPU resources and it removes the CPU bottleneck. What’s cool is you can use this hardware acceleration on both a desktop or a laptop - as long as it has an NVIDIA GTX or RTX graphics card.
Bringing more GPU acceleration to content creation tools is what NVIDIA’s Studio program is all about. When I spoke with the NVIDIA team they told me they work really close with Adobe to make sure that their hardware is optimized for Adobe tools. They tested a lot of this in the Premiere Pro Beta before going public, but now it’s available for all Premiere Pro users.
When you update to the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro, hardware encoding will automatically enabled. You can verify by going to Preferences > Media and make sure the box is checked next to “Enable hardware encoding.”
GPU should be the first thing you look for in your next editing computer and you should definitely make sure it’s a GTX or an RTX NVIDIA card. If there’s one key takeaway from this, is that you should invest in a good GPU, so if you are making your own PC or want to replace a GPU, definitely try out the Quadro RTX 4000 - you can buy it as its own unit as well.
In my recent tests between MAC & Dell Precision 7550 workstation, I found that the Dell had superior encoding capabilities in addition to excellent playback and editing. Comparing the Mac to this new Dell, which has 64GB of ram, Quadro RTX 4000 GPU, and an Intel XEON 10 Core Processor. It didn’t even have a chance in the competition.
I can already see a HUGE difference when playing back 4k footage on the Dell Precision Workstation, it’s so smooth. On my Macbook it would stutter so much on playback that I just didn’t even try with 4k anymore. If you’d like to see more details on the tests I ran on MAC VS The Dell Precision 7550, check out my full video review on Youtube.