I work for a custom computer company (I'll leave the name out just in case people don't see this as advertising) and a decent number of our customers use Premier CS6. For most system components (CPU, Motherboard, RAM) we have a pretty good handle on the performance differences between different models of components, but there does not seem to be much information on video card performance. So we are planning on performing our own set of benchmarks on the Mercury Playback Engine so that we can properly inform our customers and get them the best performance possible within their budget.

The problem is, we do not have extensive knowledge of the intricate workings of Premier. Most of our knowledge comes from benchmarks and information performed by others, so I'm hoping that some of you who use Premier everyday will be able to help us out. I've spent the last few days doing research into the Mercury Playback Engine, so I have a good handle on that specifically, but not on some of the more broad aspects of Premier. I've looked at the PPBM6 benchmark, but I'm not sure it targets GPU acceleration enough so I feel like I need to come up with some other way to benchmark. Am I thinking correctly, or would the PPBM6 benchmark be accurate enough to measure the performance difference between video cards?

From what I've read, MPE does not affect encoding/decoding, so my current plan is to take various formats of video files, slap them together, apply a bunch of GPU accelerated effects, and render the entire work area. Much like the PPBM6 benchmark, but with a focus more on GPU acceleration. Is the render time going to be an accurate benchmark of MPE performance, or is there something I am missing here? I plan on mostly taking effects from this list, and then doing a few additional things like blurs, dissolves and scaling.

Hopefully some of you could point me in the right direction here. I really want to get this right, and I feel like it will help everyone (not just our customers) make more informed decisions when it comes to purchasing a video card for use in Premier CS6.

One last question: As far as I could find, MPE only supports NVIDIA cards in Windows since it only has CUDA support right now, and not OpenCL. Is that 100% true, or is there some hack I have not heard about? I don't want to leave AMD cards out of our testing just to find that there is some work around.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate any feedback you may have.