Final Cut Pro vs Premiere Pro on iMac 2015 (bootcamp windows includ...

What is faster? Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro? Mac OS or Windows?
Let's have a look at iMac 2015 that we will "VideoBenchmark" with Final Cut Pro 10.2 and Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 on both OS X and Windows 7

The iMac we tested was running OS X Yosemity and Windows 7 64bit in Bootcamp, on Core i5 quad core processor, 8 GB of 1600 MHz memory, 1 TB harddrive wit 5400 rpm and Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics card with up to 1.5 GB of shared video memory.

But let's stop wasting time and let's look at the speed / results:

iMac2015 chart.jpg

Final Cut Pro 10.2.1:
1080p sample rendered in - 43s
4K sample rendered in - 1min 28s

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 on OS X:
1080p sample rendered in - 5min
4K sample rendered in - 13min 12s

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015 on Win 7 64bit:
1080p sample rendered in - 3min 17s
4K sample rendered in - 8min 47s

There is something that bugged me about this, despite the fact we ran the export test a few times to confirm the numbers. Why is FinalCut so much faster? The answer is really easy. This iMac has integrated graphics which Final Cut takes full advantage of. Premiere does not use it for video rendering at all and relies on the CPU only. According to the Adobe's website, this really shouldn't be the case. It should use the OpenCL of the integrated graphics card. I put a link for the list of supported graphics cards by Premiere Pro below and there you can see that this GPU is there.

The situation may look very different on a new OS X based computer that uses dedicated graphics card. We'll post results once we have tested machine like that. This would also show what performs better on new computers. From previous testing we already know that you would be better off with Premiere on Windows if you have an older Mac. We tested MacBook Pro 2010 and you can see the numbers on our website (link below).