Adobe flips on GPU-accelerated encoding for Premiere Pro, and wow it’s fast

Content creators, start your engines. Today, Adobe officially rolled out hardware encoding support for Nvidia and AMD GPUs in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Media Encoder, letting you lean on the power of your graphics card to speed up H.264 and HEVC video exporting. 

And when we say speed up, we mean speed up, as you can see in Adobe and Nvidia’s comparison graphs below. Nvidia says the newfound support for the NVENC hardware encoder in GeForce and Quadro GPUs can allow video editors to export videos up to five times faster than CPU rendering alone.

Adobe

Nvidia

Your mileage will vary depending on the workload, however. In a quick H.264 export test performed by Adam Patrick Murray, PCWorld’s lead video director, on a system with an Intel Core i7-6900K and a GeForce RTX 2080 Super, activating GPU encoding ramped up GPU utilization—as you’d expect—and cut the render time in half.

Yes please.

Flipping the GPU encoding switch changes some of your available quality options, however. Adam reports that you can’t use GPU encoding with two-pass VBR (variable bitrate), only one-pass VBR or CBR (constant bitrate). There could theoretically be an image quality hit if you’re accustomed to using two-pass VBR, though we’ve yet to test the new feature extensively. 

Adam Patrick Murray/IDG

Adam Patrick Murray/IDG

Boutique system builder Puget Systems benchmarked Premiere Pro’s new NVENC encoding support while it was in beta, however, and found “this feature resulted in between a 2-4x improvement in export times depending on the source codec with a minimal (if any) decrease in video quality.”