• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Disapointed with GPU acceleration gains in PP CS6…

  Posted by Tim Manders on September 9, 2013 at 6:43 pm

  I’m using Premiere CS6 for a while now, but until today I had a non Nvidia GPU and therefore could not make use of the Mercury playback engine and GPU acceleration.
  After reading online about the advantages it gives, I decided to sell my ATI card and bought a Nvidia GTX 660 today.

  After enabling the card and ‘unlocking’ the MPE and GPU acceleration and changing to ‘maximum render quality’ enabled as advised by this post over here ‘https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5-2.htm’, I gave it a go.

  Ok, it’s very nice that I now don’t get a red bar when I apply GPU accelerated effects such as color correction, motions and cross dissolves and can playback the video in realtime without having to render first.
  But also, I read before that the render and export times would be greatly improved. Sometimes even 10 times faster. Without testing it vigorously, that isn’t the case here. I would say its about 30% faster.

  I checked the GPU activity during rendering / exporting, as well as during playback of the effects, and never had my GPU more activity than 50%. Sometimes it was doing only 10%.

  Does that mean my GPU is bottlenecked by the rest of my system? Did I have unrealistic expectations? And what are the improvements I actually could expect?

  System information:
  CPU: i5 2500k
  GPU: GTX 660
  RAM: 8GB @ 1333 mhz
  HDD: 1TB @ 7200 rpm
  OS: Windows 7 64-bit

  I edit GH3 / 5D files so that would be h.264 compressed files.

  Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

  Kevin Monahan replied 12 years, 12 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Jeff Pulera

  September 9, 2013 at 7:01 pm

  I see a few issues –

  #1 – Core i5, should really be Core i7 for editing HD

  #2 – only 8GB RAM, 16GB preferable for performance gains. My exports sped up with 16GB upgrade

  #3 – do you only have one hard drive? Must ALWAYS use a dedicated HD for video, not C: drive, that is a basic requirement of all NLEs.

  4# – DSLR clips do seem to take a bit more horsepower to process, even on faster systems.

  Thanks

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers
• 

  Kevin Monahan

  September 9, 2013 at 9:18 pm

  [Tim Manders] “I read before that the render and export times would be greatly improved. Sometimes even 10 times faster. Without testing it vigorously, that isn’t the case here. I would say its about 30% faster.”

  Hi Tim,
  I’m not sure where you read that, but generally, encoding speed is not improved by the GPU. Encoding video is a CPU intensive task. Rendering some effects, and other things like scaling, is accelerated.

  See this video for a deeper explanation:
  

  Thanks,
  Kevin

  Kevin Monahan
  Social Support Lead
  Adobe After Effects
  Adobe Premiere Pro
  Adobe Systems, Inc.
  Follow Me on Twitter!
• 

  Tim Kolb

  September 9, 2013 at 9:34 pm

  H.264 files are one of the more demanding codecs to decode/encode. Decoding and encoding is CPU-based, while effects rendering moves to the GPU for CUDA-enabled effects, as well as post-decode processes like color space conversions and scaling (HD video in a less than HD sized window during editing that still looks good takes serious scaling work).

  I would guess that a non-Hyperthreded i5 processor is working its tail off just trying to get the frames queued up for the waiting GPU.

  Also…with CUDA enabled, “max quality” is actually working on those effects, so your results would likely be as good, but faster if you uncheck that box unless you’re exporting a scaled-down output clip. I wouldn’t turn it on for preview renders for editing 8-bit footage…

  TimK,
  Director, Consultant
  Kolb Productions,

  Adobe Certified Instructor
• 

  Kevin Monahan

  September 10, 2013 at 5:14 pm

  Thanks for all the clarifications, Tim. Hope you are well!

  Kevin Monahan
  Social Support Lead
  Adobe After Effects
  Adobe Premiere Pro
  Adobe Systems, Inc.
  Follow Me on Twitter!

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up