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Unsupported GPU will allow selection but will it boost performance?
I searched but couldn’t find anyone saying whether if Premiere CC allows switching to Open CL with an unsupported GPU, then that card can be counted on to improve playback performance. I now know that it can’t.
I was trying an ATI/AMD HD 6870 1 GB card. The choice of “Mercury Playback Engine using Open CL” shows up on the pull down menu but the card wasn’t doing any good. It was giving playback performance considerably worse in MPE Open CL than in software MPE. This is PPro 7.1 on a MacPro 4,1 with OS 10.8.5, 24 Gigs, SSD and 4 drive SATA RAID.
For example, I was editing a 3 minute, 1080i show with AVC-Intra 100 footage, plus moves on stills animated with the motion tab, some 3-way color corrector and some imported graphics rendered at 1080i ProRes 4444. I was having lots of halting playback as I edited, even at 1/2 res. The JPEGs were about 2500 pixels in the largest dimension, though a few are around 5000. If the card were helping, than it really it shouldn’t be worse using Open CL than in software mode.
Today I swapped in an NVidia GTX 760 with 2 GBs, which while not on the supported list for Mac, is on the list for Windows and is a CUDA card. Much improved performance! Clean playback and much faster rendering. I’m happy. I hope this helps someone.
– Larry Asbell
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5 Replies
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With the unsupported card, did you delete the text file in the installation folder that lists the supported GPUs? I don’t recall the name (because I have deleted it so that my K4000 card would e recognized), but at least on Windows it has “gpu” in the name, and contains a textual list of supported cards. If you don’t delete this file (or add the GPU name precisely into the list — but deleting the file is better), then Premiere will not use the card.
Note that the supported list isn’t a list of the ponly cards that work — it’s just a list of the cards that Adobe has had time to extensively test. My k4000 (and K2000m) cards work great with Premiere and After Effects, once you delete the supported GPUs file in the case of Premiere, or add the card to After Effect’s card list (deleting the after effects file doesn’t seem to work).
And, you have to do this again after each time Premiere or After Effects gets updated.
Hope that helps!
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Thanks for the suggestion James. Yes, in my search I came across that and I tried both adding the name and deleting (hiding) the file. Yet after rebooting PPro, performance was no better.
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[James Kumorek] “With the unsupported card, did you delete the text file in the installation folder that lists the supported GPUs? I don’t recall the name (because I have deleted it so that my K4000 card would e recognized), but at least on Windows it has “gpu” in the name, and contains a textual list of supported cards. If you don’t delete this file (or add the GPU name precisely into the list — but deleting the file is better), then Premiere will not use the card… And, you have to do this again after each time Premiere or After Effects gets updated.”
Premiere Pro CC (and now Ae CC 12.1) allow you to choose an unsupported graphics card directly from the application without having to edit the GPU whitelist file. This is a new feature.
As Larry notes, it may or may not improve your performance.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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fyi I usually resize any graphics down to 4000 pixels maximum before importing them.
With 5000 size you can run into odd issues. 4000 is plenty.
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Chris wrote:
fyi I usually resize any graphics down to 4000 pixels maximum before importing them. With 5000 size you can run into odd issues. 4000 is plenty.Certainly is true in FCP7. Premiere CC seems a whole lot more tolerant of large stills. I was just reading it’s specs on that and IIRC it’s limitation is something like 25,000 pixels! However I do agree — you generally don’t need it anything over 2000-4000.
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