2014 VS 2015 Macbook Pro Comparison for Final Cut – Nvidia VS AMD graphics results.

[Joe Marler]

Max thanks for all the work on this comparison. It was well written, well shot, and will help a lot of people.

I don’t know what is Adobe’s problem with implementing Quick Sync. They said the CC “rent only” model would allow adding features faster, vs waiting for the next major version. It has now been two years and still no Quick Sync. Your tests plus many others show how important this is for H.264 exporting.

This is further important since interframe encoding doesn’t really benefit from GPU acceleration, no matter how powerful. The core algorithm is intrinsically sequential and cannot be easily parallelized for GPU assist. This is also a problem for the Mac Pro since Xeon doesn’t have Quick Sync.

Supposedly Skylake will further enhance Quick Sync to include HVEC/H.265 and maybe VP9. Encoding to H.265 is much more CPU intensive than H.264, so the Quick Sync advantage on H.265 may be further magnified. Maybe Adobe will have it by then. Until Intel adds it to Xeon there is no good answer for Xeon-based systems.

Your main goal was not Premiere vs FCP but 2014 vs 2015 MBP, and you achieved that well. My only recommendation would be adding one test to neutralize the Quick Sync advantage to better assess performance without this influencing the results so much. On FCP X that would be using multi-pass encoding, then you’d have to use the closest equivalent on Premiere. It would just be interesting to see it changes the 2014 vs 2015 MBP difference, and whether FCP X was still faster than Premiere at H.264 export without this advantage.

[Claude Lyneis]

I found this very interesting, although more for the speed differences between X and Premiere. If this was posted in the FCPX debate forum instead of techniques, it would launch a huge discussion on X vs PP. Anyway, happy to see FCPX has a great engine underneath.

[Max Yuryev]

Thanks! I will post it there 🙂