Adobe performance improvements

This was mentioned elsewhere but I wanted to ensure everyone here saw it. Summary: Using the Metal API and an improved playback engine, Adobe is making significant performance improvements to Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop and (maybe) Lightroom. Unfortunately one of the Premiere enhancements (H264 hardware encoding) will be Windows only for now.

Anyone who works with Premiere CC, AE, Lightroom, etc and has comparative experience with FCPX, Motion, etc. knows that Adobe has drastic performance problems in some cases. Their Mercury rendering engine worked well on H264 1080 content but degraded severely on 4K. IMO it's not really usable for 4K multicam on a top-spec iMac 27 unless you manually transcode and it has no built-in proxy support. Adobe is now adding proxy.

In my previous tests Premiere CC's update frame rate was 20 times slower than FCPX when fast forwarding on an H264 4K timeline. Premiere's keyboard lag to JKL input when working on a 4K H264 timeline is vastly slower than FCPX. Adobe is adding H264 hardware support on "Windows Intel Iris only". I assume that means Quick Sync but Windows only. Iris is Intel's term for integrated GPU which is required for Quick Sync regardless of whether a discrete GPU is installed.

For high-resolution raw stills, Lightroom CC is about 8x slower than Apple Photos at browsing through an album. This is despite LR having pre-generated 1:1 previews. On my 2015 top-spec iMac 27, Lightroom actually slows down if I enable the GPU which illustrates how poorly coded the app is from a performance standpoint.

Adobe previously demonstrated some impressive ongoing AE performance work using the Metal API on OSX. They said these improvements would also be applied to Photoshop and Illustrator. They didn't mention Lightroom but I assume it would get those -- it really needs it. Timeframe for shipping these was unstated but hopefully not too much longer:


At NAB they announced Premiere CC will (finally) get built-in proxy support and an improved rendering engine: www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/produc...eo-NAB-datasheet.pdf

Of course this is at odds with Adobe's long-stated goal of responsive editing on most camera native formats with no transcoding: helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/video-formats.html

But with 4K and 8K becoming more common they had to add this. This is good news for Adobe customers, whether on Windows or Mac. It appears on OSX that FCPX will retain the performance advantage of Quick Sync.

I will do some tests and post the results whenever they release the new versions.

Glad to hear that, thanks for sharing.