Am I Hardware limited or Software Limited?

bmilleson wrote:

Thank you, I didn't have a full understanding of how to read the activity monitors and assumed it was a software limitation

It can be tricky sometimes. Your computer has 10 cores. The utilization in the process listing is per core. Down at the bottom, the 80% idle value is for all cores. Premier Pro is using the equivalent of a little bit more than a single core.

But these video processes are likely heavily using the GPU. Using the GPU requires CPU processesing too. But judging from that GPU history, it's not using the GPU very efficiently. It looks like it is hitting 60% GPU usage once every 6 frames. So that's roughly 10% GPU usage.

You haven't said anything about your storage. It's possible that slow storage could be a bottleneck too.

Etrecheck:

Consider downloading and running this little "discovery" utility, Etrecheck. It changes NOTHING. Etrecheck was developed by senior contributor here, and uses system calls to collect often-needed information.

it contains little tests for speeds of devices, CPU utilization, memory usage, energy usage and a digest of recent problems, in one easy to use package. it does not even need to be Installed. Because less can be learned when your Mac is running great, best time to run is when your problems are actually occurring, if possible.

if you follow the directions faithfully, its report (pre-laundered of all personally-identifiable information) can be "Shared" to the System ClipBoard, then Pasted into an ‘Additional Text’ window in a reply on the forums.

Use Etrecheck Pro for free:

http://Etrecheck.com

then PASTE the clipboard into an "additional text"Window on the forums:

Looking at the CPU and GPU % but also time - it looks like Adobe is using the CPU almost exclusively and the GPU is mostly being used by WindowServer (only for the rendering on-screen?).

I wonder if there is either something in the plugin code or even just some settings for Adobe that are making it choose a less efficient path for parallel operations.

It looks pretty straightforward. Your CPU is 80% idle. You're showing some relatively high, but intermittent, GPU usage. Your computer is not working hard at all. It's a software problem.

bmilleson wrote:

Just working off the internal 8TB SSD, i have roughly 1TB free and in my experience the fuller the SSD, the slower the performance but i'm under the impression that doesn't fall off until you're closer to full capacity. Not sure when the fall off occurs.

Then it probably isn't storage. I just had to put that out there as another possibility. You can never tell when people have a super-fast external SSD connected to a USB 2.0 bus.