Interested by performance issue ? Read this ! If you can explain, you're a master Jedi !

Question

This is the question we will try to answer...
What si the bottle neck (hardware) of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
I used PPBM5 as a benchmark testing template.
All the data and log as been collected using performance counter
First of all, describe my computer...
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Xeon E5 2687W @ 3.10GHz
Sandy Bridge-EP/EX 32nm Technology
RAM
Corsair Dominator Platinum 64.0 GB DDR3
Motherboard
EVGA Corporation Classified SR-X
Graphics
PNY Nvidia Quadro 6000
EVGA Nvidia GTX 680   // Yes, I created bench stats for both card
Hard Drives
16.0GB Romex RAMDISK (RAID)
556GB LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i SATA3 6GB/s 5 disks with Fastpath Chip Installed (RAID 0)
I have other RAID installed, but not relevant for the present post...
PSU
Cosair 1000 Watts
After many days of tests, I wanna share my results with community and comment them.
CPU Introduction
I tested my cpu and pushed it at maximum speed to understand where is the limit, can I reach this limit and I've logged precisely all result in graph (See pictures 1).
Intro : I tested my E5-XEON 2687W (8 Cores Hyperthread - 16 threads) to know if programs can use the maximum of it.  I used Prime 95 to get the result.  // I know this seem to be ordinary, but you will understand soon...
The result : Yes, I can get 100% of my CPU with 1 program using 20 threads in parallel.  The CPU gives everything it can !
Comment : I put 3 IO (cpu, disk, ram) on the graph of my computer during the test...
(picture 1)
Disk Introduction
I tested my disk and pushed it at maximum speed to understand where is the limit and I've logged precisely all result in graph (See pictures 2).
Intro : I tested my RAID 0 556GB (LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i SATA3 6GB/s 5 disks with Fastpath Chip Installed) to know if I can reach the maximum % disk usage (0% idle Time)
The result : As you can see in picture 2, yes, I can get the max of my drive at ~ 1.2 Gb/sec read/write steady !
Comment : I put 3 IO (cpu, disk, ram) on the graph of my computer during the test to see the impact of transfering many Go of data during ~10 sec...
(picture 2)
Now, I know my limits !  It's time to enter deeper in the subject !
PPBM5 (H.264) Result
I rendered the sequence (H.264) using Adobe Media Encoder.
The result :
My CPU is not used at 100%, the turn around 50%
My Disk is totally idle !
All the process usage are idle except process of (Adobe Media Encoder)
The transfert rate seem to be a wave (up and down).  Probably caused by (Encrypt time....  write.... Encrypt time.... write...)  // It's ok, ~5Mb/sec during transfert rate !
CPU Power management give 100% of clock to CPU during the encoding process (it's ok, the clock is stable during process).
RAM, more than enough !  39 Go RAM free after the test !  // Excellent
~65 thread opened by Adobe Media Encoder (Good, thread is the sign that program try to using many cores !)
GPU Load on card seem to be a wave also ! (up and down)  ~40% usage of GPU during the process of encoding.
GPU Ram get 1.2Go of RAM (But with GTX 680, no problem and Quadro 6000 with 6 GB RAM, no problem !)
Comment/Question : CPU is free (50%), disks are free (99%), GPU is free (60%), RAM is free (62%), my computer is not pushed at limit during the encoding process.  Why ????  Is there some time delay in the encoding process ?
Other : Quadro 6000 & GTX 680 gives the same result !
(picture 3)
PPBM5 (Disk Test) Result (RAID LSI)
I rendered the sequence (Disk Test) using Adobe Media Encoder on my RAID 0 LSI disk.
The result :
My CPU is not used at 100%
My Disk wave and wave again, but far far from the limit !
All the process usage are idle except process of (Adobe Media Encoder)
The transfert rate wave and wave again (up and down).  Probably caused by (Buffering time....  write.... Buffering time.... write...)  // It's ok, ~375Mb/sec peak during transfert rate !  Easy !
CPU Power management give 100% of clock to CPU during the encoding process (it's ok, the clock is stable during process).
RAM, more than enough !  40.5 Go RAM free after the test !  // Excellent
~48 thread opened by Adobe Media Encoder (Good, thread is the sign that program try to using many cores !)
GPU Load on card = 0 (This kind of encoding is GPU irrelevant)
GPU Ram get 400Mb of RAM (No usage for encoding)
Comment/Question : CPU is free (65%), disks are free (60%), GPU is free (100%), RAM is free (63%), my computer is not pushed at limit during the encoding process.  Why ????  Is there some time delay in the encoding process ?
(picture 4)
PPBM5 (Disk Test) Result (Direct in RAMDrive)
I rendered the same sequence (Disk Test) using Adobe Media Encoder directly in my RamDrive
Comment/Question : Look at the transfert rate under (picture 5).  It's exactly the same speed than with my RAID 0 LSI controller.  Impossible !  Look in the same picture the transfert rate I can reach with the ramdrive (> 3.0 Gb/sec steady) and I don't go under 30% of disk usage.  CPU is idle (70%), Disk is idle (100%), GPU is idle (100%) and RAM is free (63%).  // This kind of results let me REALLY confused.  It's smell bug and big problem with hardware and IO usage in CS6 !
(picture 5)
PPBM5 (MPEG-DVD) Result
I rendered the sequence (MPEG-DVD) using Adobe Media Encoder.
The result :
My CPU is not used at 100%
My Disk is totally idle !
All the process usage are idle except process of (Adobe Media Encoder)
The transfert rate wave and wave again (up and down).  Probably caused by (Encoding time....  write.... Encoding time.... write...)  // It's ok, ~2Mb/sec during transfert rate !  Real Joke !
CPU Power management give 100% of clock to CPU during the encoding process (it's ok, the clock is stable during process).
RAM, more than enough !  40 Go RAM free after the test !  // Excellent
~80 thread opened by Adobe Media Encoder (Lot of thread, but it's ok in multi-thread apps!)
GPU Load on card = 100 (This use the maximum of my GPU)
GPU Ram get 1Gb of RAM
Comment/Question : CPU is free (70%), disks are free (98%), GPU is loaded (MAX), RAM is free (63%), my computer is pushed at limit during the encoding process for GPU only.  Now, for this kind of encoding, the speed limit is affected by the slower IO (Video Card GPU)
Other : Quadro 6000 is slower than GTX 680 for this kind of encoding (~20 s slower than GTX).
(picture 6)
Encoding single clip FULL HD AVCHD to H.264 Result (Premiere Pro CS6)
You can look the result in the picture.
Comment/Question : CPU is free (55%), disks are free (99%), GPU is free (90%), RAM is free (65%), my computer is not pushed at limit during the encoding process.  Why ????   Adobe Premiere seem to have some bug with thread management.  My hardware is idle !  I understand AVCHD can be very difficult to decode, but where is the waste ?  My computer want, but the software not !
(picture 7)
Render composition using 3D Raytracer in After Effects CS6
You can look the result in the picture.
Comment : GPU seems to be the bottle neck when using After Effects.  CPU is free (99%), Disks are free (98%), Memory is free (60%) and it depend of the setting and type of project.
Other : Quadro 6000 & GTX 680 gives the same result in time for rendering the composition.
(picture 8)
Conclusion
There is nothing you can do (I thing) with CS6 to get better performance actually.  GTX 680 is the best (Consumer grade card) and the Quadro 6000 is the best (Profressional card).  Both of card give really similar result (I will probably return my GTX 680 since I not really get any better performance).  I not used Tesla card with my Quadro, but actually, both, Premiere Pro & After Effects doesn't use multi GPU.  I tried to used both card together (GTX & Quadro), but After Effects gives priority to the slower card (In this case, the GTX 680)
Premiere Pro, I'm speechless !  Premiere Pro is not able to get max performance of my computer.  Not just 10% or 20%, but average 60%.  I'm a programmor, multi-threadling apps are difficult to manage and I can understand Adobe's programmor.  But actually, if anybody have comment about this post, tricks or any kind of solution, you can comment this post.  It's seem to be a bug...
Thank you.

Answer 1

Patrick,
I can't explain everything, but let me give you some background as I understand it.
The first issue is that CS6 has a far less efficient internal buffering or caching system than CS5/5.5. That is why the MPEG encoding in CS6 is roughly 2-3 times slower than the same test with CS5. There is some 'under-the-hood' processing going on that causes this significant performance loss.
The second issue is that AME does not handle regular memory and inter-process memory very well. I have described this here: Latest News
As to your test results, there are some other noteworthy things to mention. 3D Ray tracing in AE is not very good in using all CUDA cores. In fact it is lousy, it only uses very few cores and the threading is pretty bad and does not use the video card's capabilities effectively. Whether that is a driver issue with nVidia or an Adobe issue, I don't know, but whichever way you turn it, the end result is disappointing.
The overhead AME carries in our tests is something we are looking into and the next test will only use direct export and no longer the AME queue, to avoid some of the problems you saw. That entails other problems for us, since we lose the capability to check encoding logs, but a solution is in the works.
You see very low GPU usage during the H.264 test, since there are only very few accelerated parts in the timeline, in contrast to the MPEG2-DVD test, where there is rescaling going on and that is CUDA accelerated. The disk I/O test suffers from the problems mentioned above and is the reason that my own Disk I/O results are only 33 seconds with the current test, but when I extend the duration of that timeline to 3 hours, the direct export method gives me 22 seconds, although the amount of data to be written, 37,092 MB has increased threefold. An effective write speed of 1,686 MB/s.
There are a number of performance issues with CS6 that Adobe is aware of, but whether they can be solved and in what time, I haven't the faintest idea.
Just my $ 0.02