[Peter Meister]

Hi.
Using a PC with multiple drives and an NVIDIA 760.
Just a few notes as I had the problem that my space bar and play button were not letting preview video play in Adobe Premier Pro CC. The option to use the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration was also grayed (greyed) out. I guess I fixed it. I had been swapping between speakers and my USB headset (yanking the headphones out willy nilly) while working on the soundtrack for my video in Audition, and my computer, or adobe software, did not like that. Somewhere along the line things stopped playing on Audition so I fiddled with the audio hardware. Well, when I got to Premiere, Premiere would have none of that. I couldn’t get the space bar or play button to work, turns out that redoing the settings in Audition helped things out. (Oh… so that was what that mysterious pop up warning was when I changed my hardware settings in Audition – HA)

Along my merry troubleshooting way, which included restarting Premiere and the computer, I got a message that Premiere could not find a CUDA compliant GPU. Strange. I know the NVIDIA 760 is compliant. Here was Premiere telling me it wasn’t going to use my once-pricey video card. I was certainly not going to use software acceleration with my pretty old CPU (i3).

If Premiere is not recognizing your graphics card, which you know is CUDA (it’s most likely a PCI express card), your Premiere may be attempting to use some lame motherboard based graphics chip, which generally stinks. IF you have access to your bios, restart the computer and go into BIOS setup. Under peripherals in your BIOS menu, instruct your computer to launch graphics from your video card and not internal graphics. The setting is called ‘PEG’

Select “GFX0” or “PEG” to switch to a peripheral component interconnect express card, “PCI” to switch to a PCI card, “AGP” to switch to an accelerated graphics port card or “GPP” to use multiple graphics adapters. “IGFX” is a setting that will use your motherboard’s OEM graphics, which generally, as I said before “stink”. There is also sometimes an option called “Auto” which lets the bios decide, but I’ve been suspicious that it ignores my card.

Anyway,if your bios startup setting is on “auto” you may be trying to run Premiere off your mother board and not your super expensive graphics card.

I set my bios to PEG, restarted the computer, made sure I was using the same audio hardware settings on both Audition and Premiere, and so far the space bar not working problem seems to have been fixed. I was now granted the well earned right to use the fabled Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration. I felt like I just strolled into the swankest club in town.

Now with all this knowledge there is ONE caveat: If you set your bios to “PEG” or whatever setting uses your graphics card first, and for some reason a buggy update has wrecked your graphics drivers, you may wake up one morning before a major project is due, and find your screens won’t work. Restarting does nothing.

Calmly open up your computer (CALMLY) and remove the card and start up the computer again. It will go to the motherboard graphics drivers even if the bios is set to PEG. Then another chapter will begin in your journey to say “WHY ME, GOD?” and throw the computer out the window as you attempt to fix your video card drivers. You will eventually fix them (after the client storms out and heads back to Tulsa) and then you can set your bios to PEG again and bask in the glory of a computer that will function until… the next software update. GOOD LUCK!