AMD continues to lag behind Nvidia in video editing

Nvidia has long had a close collaboration with companies like Adobe regarding the acceleration of its productivity suite Creative Cloud, where its CUDA API for graphics card calculations has been at the center. This has led to Nvidia being de facto dominant in production studios, something AMD has tried in vain to change through the adoption of the API OpenCL.

Support for video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Designs Davinci Resolve is certainly available for both acceleration via CUDA and OpenCL – but AMD has long lagged behind. Video specialists Puget Systems have now developed a new test suite where the company compares AMD’s top card Radeon RX 6900 XT against Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 3000 series in just Resolve.

The result means gloomy reading for AMD, whose “Big Navi” card does not even reach the performance of the previous generation top card from Nvidia, the Geforce RTX 2080 Ti can earn in total points. On average, even the middle class in Nvidia’s graphics card series, RTX 3060 Ti, performs about 10 percent better in video rendering.

The graphics cards in the Radeon RX 6000 series certainly improve the results set by the predecessor RX 5700 XT, but with the exception of Puget’s test regarding GPU-accelerated effects, the improvements are in line with what Nvidia has been able to produce – which is why AMD is still lagging behind in video editing. Puget Systems Matt Bach seems to agree with:

Overall, AMD is heading in the right direction with the Radeon 6000 series cards, but just like we saw in many Adobe applications, even the impressive gains they are showing over the 5700 XT simply isn’t enough for them to catch up to NVIDIA.

The one who hoped for change regarding Nvidia’s dominance in the video editing suites, at least Davinci Resolve, thus unfortunately seems to have hoped in vain.