NVIDIA Card with Yosemite and Premiere causing major graphics failure

[Houston Bass]

Having the same issues:

screen-shot-2014-12-08-at-9.12.54-pm.png

These graphics errors all appeared during, or after heavy work in premiere or after effects.

[Dan Finlayson]

Today I thought I’d “upgrade” to Yosemite. I decided to check the forums and man am I glad I did!

I have the 2010 Mac Pro 6-core with a Radeon HD 5870 GPU. And I came across a few threads like this one:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6606806

So I started researching Nvidia options. Hey! Maybe its time to get on the CUDA train! I GUESS NOT.

Seems like Yosemite just plain messes up a wide range of graphics cards. This is a big issue, affecting a lot of customers!

[Ze’ev Gilad]

I may have found something…

I was about to take my machine in to Apple for service, but before doing so I thought I’d try running Premiere in a ‘clean’ user account.

So I made a new (admin) account, copied over some project files, and launched Premiere.

I set the project to CUDA, started ‘working’, and immediately noticed some differences: playback would start much faster, rendering started faster, less jerkiness in playback. And I was not getting any of the glitchiness. I had other issues besides the glitchiness, like clips dropped in dynamically from Ae would not update unless I manually switched over to Ae, and these things went away.

I didn’t really spend several hours actually working, but it seems much smoother. Made me think the issue was due to ‘gunked up’ settings etc over months of work.

So I (backed up and) wiped my drive, clean installed Yosemite (I was on Mavericks before), set up CC etc. But after copying over all my settings, including downloading settings from Adobe, the performance was twitchy again. Bummer.

I created a fresh account again, and again, in the new account, Premiere performed much better. Even complex speed ramps and Ae clips played back incredibly fast in real time, better than I’ve seen in months.

I won’t know for sure until I spend a day editing, but it might be that a lot of these issues stem from corruption or some kind in the user settings.

So I went back to my original account, and deleted EVERYTHING with the word ‘adobe’ or ‘premiere’ within my User folder (including ~/Library and ~/Documents). The performance is now similar to that of the ‘clean’ account.

So far it’s working rather well … I will report back after spending more time.

Maybe some other can test this out and report back … try a fresh account, and if you notice a difference, go back to your main account and delete (or put aside) all the Adobe stuff in your ~ folder. DO NOT SYNC SETTINGS from Adobe servers.

If, like me, you absolutely need your custom keyboard shortcuts, you can manually copy the .kys files from
~/Documents/Adobe/Premiere Pro/8.0/Profile-CreativeCloud/Mac/

[Ze’ev Gilad]

From the Adobe thread:

Hi All,

Thank you for offering your help to Adobe and other users. This is much appreciated. I’m sorry your experiencing this screen corruption issue.

We have been able to reproduce this issue and now we’re trying to determine the cause. Unfortunately this is not a simple process and we’re working closely with our partners to provide a fix as soon as possible.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll post updates as soon as they come.

Peter Garaway
Adobe
Premiere Pro

https://forums.adobe.com/message/7243916#7243916

[Ryan Davis]

I have all the symptoms as well but I am on an IMac 2014

[Doug Weiner]

One interesting data point that might be useful:

Rendering sequences in Premier Pro Cloud using a Nvidia 650 Ti causes screen corruption while but using NVIDIA 5000 does not. Please note I didn’t do exhaustive testing. Awhile back, I had the Nvidia 650 Ti installed and was getting the crashes which I thought was probably due to the fact the cards was a consumer card. So when I swapped out the card for an NVIDIA 5000 card (from an HP z800) and the problem went away, I thought I was right. Now back to the hardware/software details/workflow set-up.

I have a Hackintosh station using Premiere Pro CC. My source files are from HD TIFF image sequences, cut into timelines. (scanning old film). One sequence is destined for an HD ProRes quicktime, and the the other a smaller h264. The HD sequence has no effects, the h264 sometimes has a color correct (Colorista II or the built in Lumeri effects or built in Color Correct tool and a Time Code burn in. For rendering, I use Adobe Media Encoder for about 85 % and Premier 15%.

Hardware Setup:
i7 Hackintosh 3rd Gen Ivy
PP cloud 7.2.2 (v33)
10.8.5
CUDA: 6.5.18
GPU Driver Version: 8.17.76 (313.01.04f01)

Using the Titan 650 TI, I can regularly get screen corruption. I am unsure if I ever got this setup to work at all but I think it worked sometimes. Never on long sequences. Again, didn’t exhaustive investigate.

However, using the exact setup about and the Nvdia 5000, I have made at least 500 renders this way – 10 to 30 minute sequences, all with hardware CUDA enabled.

I have very little professional computer training, but I have been alive before there were computers and watched them grow up – meaning this kind of issue seems early familiar to when you push hardware and software to new limits from Vendors or do not share critical info, you get these annoying anomalies for which nobody is willing to take responsibility. My experienced guess, its how the CUDA driver is managing the flow of memory on the card or the flow from the card to the OS. (Like the card/driver sloppily dumping 4 gigs of rendered stuff to the OS and the OS not able to deal with it like – oh shit, I was not built to handle that much data in a moments notice, and the card says, hey you said come to the party with some friends, and the OS says, yeah like bring one or two, I was prepared for a party of 20 people but you brought 100 with you, and the card says, WTF bro, you didn’t’ specify, and the OS says I didn’t think I needed to, who the frick brings 100 people to a party, and the card says, what can I say I am popular, and the OS says, well you can’t bring the 100 in here, I don’t have the space for it even I wanted to, and the card, says this is bullshit I brought all these friends already I am coming in and then the two start arguing and finally some neighbor who was not invited the party and is quietly pissed about that but was putting up with it all to be a good neighbor because at least the party sounded fun through the closed door and he was getting a tiny bit of enjoyment from that, but in no way is going to put up with all the arguing and 100 people milling about the hallway, so he called the police and then the computer crashes. Its just like that.

[Ze’ev Gilad]

LOL. Hilarious! ROTF

[John Vargo]

I was able to get through a full edit yesterday with no corruption by disconnecting my external displays and using rMBP built-in display.

Anyone else have any success doing this?

[Jim Swinson]

I had forgotten I did have some luck with that one time when I could not get through a render without my iMac rebooting so I disconnected my second monitor and it amazingly got through. Not sure why I did not think about that again and try it while editing also. The problem is I really like having my second monitor for full screen display of video especially when color correcting and color grading.

[John Vargo]

I totally agree, but maybe it will help Adobe/Apple/NVIDIA with the troubleshooting.