I think people have missed this. I've spent some time working Premiere Pro video editing rigs, and here are my takeaways.
- Premiere has recently allowed hardware (GPU) encoding when rendering H264 and HEVC. This MASSIVELY speeds up video rendering times - think 2 minutes instead of 20 minutes, depending on workload. More details:
Adobe flips on GPU-accelerated encoding for Premiere Pro, and wow it's fast
- So suddenly GPU does matter for rendering, where in the past it was not very important for Premiere.
- That said your 1080Ti is a BEAST for rendering and probably won't need to be upgraded for ages. I know the benchmarks tell a different story, but I compared renders (mixed 1080p footage, animations, etc.) on a 1080 non-Ti vs a 2070 SUPER. Based on benchmarks the 2070 should have creamed the 1080 but the difference was absolutely minimal - 2-3 seconds faster on the 1080 actually.
- Plus the 1080Ti has 11GB of VRAM which is more than most cards. This should help make scrubbing along your timeline faster. I would NOT recommend ever getting a card with less VRAM than this because that would likely be a downgrade for you. So keep the 1080Ti until cards with bigger VRAM become affordable.
With that out of the way, some more advice:
- Premiere will happily use all the RAM you give it, but how much is needed depends on the edit - specifically how many and how large your source files are. If you have tons of source videos then you can easily hit 40GB + of RAM usage even at 1080P. So I would recommend at least 32GB (especially since you're coming from 24GB), but if you do do really big renders, then more is better. Note here that RAM speed should make very little difference so DDR4 2400MHz is perfect.
- Another point people forget is the speed of your hard drive. Hard drives will bottleneck your renders, and will make scrubbing along your timeline a nightmare with larger edits. An SSD will drastically improve this. You don't need an NVMe drive, SATA is good enough (Linus did a video on this where people couldn't tell the difference between the two in video editing or gaming). Size of SSD depends on the size of your projects - you want it to be big enough so that the eintire project folder of the edit you're currently working on, can fit on it. So check how big your projects are and make sure the biggest single project will fit. (Of course you don't need SSDs to store your old projects on, just the one you are currently working on).
- With the advent of GPU acceleration, the CPU has taken a backseat in importance - EXCEPT if you can't render in H264 or HVEC for some reason, then you're back to CPU rendering only. Either way the more threads the better. Premiere likes Intel more than AMD (check benchmarks) so core-for-core Intel CPUs will beat AMD cores. AMD wins when it has more threads. Compare Premiere export benchmarks, but an older 16-thread second-gen Ryzen 7 may actually be a good bet.
Sorry for the rant, and my advice will cost you way more than 5k (sorry!). But crazy idea - maybe upgrade to a 1TB SSD first, as you can carry that over to your new system. Do that, and make sure you're using GPU acceleration, and your renders will probably be faster already. Then you can save up for the CPU/Mobo/RAM upgrade because honestly unless you're getting 32GB of RAM, I think your performance won't be very different.
Please feel free to PM me if you struggle to get GPU acceleration going! It can be finnicky but it will blow your mind when you see it!
