Poor Metal Performance Using in Premiere Pro vs OpenCL

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Poor Metal Performance Using in Premiere Pro vs OpenCL

Im a video editor using Premiere Pro on a 10 Core iMac Pro with Vega 64 card and 128g rams and most of my footage is hi res 6K-8K RED footage. Using Metal gives me horrible performance but OpenCL works like a breeze. Everything is much snappier and fluid. Apple has stated that Metal was supposed to give you better performance which is absolutely not the case. Why is that?

I spoke to an adobe tech and he stated that Metal is used best for computers with Intel graphic chipsets, not pro machines with dedicated graphics cards. So using OpenCL will give you the best performance for machines that have Radeon Pro cards as an example or using Cuda for machines that have Nvidia Cards.

I also read conflicting info about apple is planning on removing OpenCL support and replacing it with Metal. This would be a horrible if this is true. The adobe tech assured me OpenCL will be available in Premiere Pro for the foreseeable future. But I'm still concerned because apple has made some horrible choices when It comes to the pro community and a Pro editor like myself would not benefit from Metal if its not performing equal or better than OpenCL. Can someone, preferably an Apple tech jump in for some clarity.

Posted on Jan 18, 2019 1:43 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 13, 2019 4:53 PM in response to Azzie

I use a 2017 MacBook Pro with a Vega 64egpu. The latest update to Mojave 10.4.3 has further deteriorated openCL availability for me. In premiere up until yesterday magic bullet denoiser 3 worked with GPu acceleration. Now it no longer works.

While premiere still supports OpenCL Apple does not. My render times using metal are approx 20% slower across the board. Plus the safe margins overlay does not work when metal is selected.

For me as an editor Mojave is not a good fit right now.

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Answer 2

Feb 14, 2019 3:48 AM in response to Azzie

I am not an expert in this field but Metal is supposed to work on supported models of Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPU chips.

I could certainly imagine that it might perform better on say an AMD video chip than Nvidia since Apple do not ship any Nvidia equipped Macs. I would however expect it to perform better on an AMD than an Intel since nearly all AMD GPUs will be inherently more powerful.

Beyond that Adobe has added (some) support for Metal but my impression is that this is still partial and far from being as optimised as their OpenCL and/or CUDA support which they have done for a longer amount of time. Adobe products are generally regarded as performing better with Nvidia cards and CUDA whilst Apple's products including FinalCut ProX is regarded as working better with AMD video cards.

Since Apple's reputation in terms of GPU drivers is 'poor' it is also possible that Metal is still in need of significant improvement regardless of what GPU chip is being used. As an example a game tested in macOS using Metal in a Mac Pro and then tested in the same Mac Pro running Windows and a DirectX10 version showed the Windows version performing much better.

Note: I referred to the much older DirectX10, one would expect DirectX11 and DirectX12 to perform even better showing how far behind Metal might still be. :(

So whilst Apple I suspect shares some of the fault so will Adobe.

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Poor Metal Performance Using in Premiere Pro vs OpenCL

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