We get asked a lot about what kind of hardware to buy for optimum performance for Adobe Premiere Pro (and After Effects). In fact, we get asked so often, that we’ve put together this brief FAQ entry:
“FAQ: What computer and components should I buy for Premiere Pro or After Effects?”
By far, the most common specific question that we get in this area is about what graphics card to get to take advantage of the GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro–specifically the CUDA processing features in Premiere Pro CS5 and later.
For details about what CUDA is and what Adobe Premiere Pro does with it, see this page:
“CUDA, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro”
So, about that question…
I think that the best way to answer a question like that is to point people to hard data and side-by-side comparisons so that they can make their own decisions. That’s why I am so pleased that several people have been doing tests and publishing their results.
I want to call special attention to these three resources:
- Dennis Radeke’s “Diving into NVIDIA GPUs and what they mean for Premiere Pro”
- Jan Ozer’s “Choosing a Graphics Card for Premiere Pro CS5.5”
- Harm Millaard and Bill Gehrke’s PPBM5 (Premiere Pro benchmark) test results
The first two articles give detailed results about specific side-by-side tests run by the authors. The third is especially fascinating, because it’s a table of results submitted by hundreds of users who have run a standard benchmark test; you can learn a lot by skimming through the results and seeing how systems that differ only in their GPUs performed.
If you have questions about GPUs (or any hardware) for Premiere Pro, feel free to come to the Premiere Pro hardware forum, and we can help you there.