ephtrackx, The first thing I would check is the mercury playback engine (project settings) and make sure its on GPU - opencl, then I'd make a short time line in premiere with any footage you have available and put about 10 gaussian blurs on it set to 100. With your GPU monitor open (I've been using GPU-Z) play back the time line and watch the gpu usage. This test puts minimal load on the other aspects of your system so it's unlikely to bottleneck while asking a lot of the gpu. If you still don't have any activity I would completely remove the drivers and reinstall them. Use 16.7.3 and avoid 16.9 until it's no longer a beta. I have had instances where premiere wouldn't release the graphics card even after being shutdown, but I at least had activity on the GPU rather than none. In another scenario, renders with media encoder where significantly slower if I left Premiere open in the background. I'm sure you've all ready covered most of that, I can't think of much else that would cause it not to use the GPU. RoninEdits​ You are right about the hypertheading, I do get a small rendering boost when it's off, but only with the GTX, not the RX480, and only with projects that have a dynamic link to AE. thanmartin​ look for a setting in preferences that says "use Intel fast h.264 encoding" or something like that, I think it's under general, maybe memory settings. I turned it off and it made a big difference for me. I did some further bench marking, not so much real world, but to find the actual differences in performance. Same system as above, hyerthreading off just for fun. One minute timeline of 4k XAVC from a sony A7s II. 10 Gaussian blurs set to 100. Render to 4k h.264. GTX 970- 5:12, full resolution playback of 3 active GTX 1070- 3:28, full resolution playback of 6 active RX480x1- 4:27, full resolution payback of 4 active RX480x2- 2:15, full resolution playback of 4 active CPU and RAM stayed between 10-20% and all the cards used about 90% of their available RAM (8gb RX 480's). I've been doing tests like these for the last week and they all have similar results, whether I used DNx HD vs. XAVC, or rendering to 720 or 1080. What I get out of it: The Cuda vs. Opencl in Adobe argument isn't as valid as it once was. The RX480 is suppose to perform slightly better than a GTX 970, and it does. I think if Adobe still heavily favored Cuda, the RX480 would perform closer to or worse than the 970 given their specs. I could be wrong so feel free to correct me. I also see Adobe making good use of dual GPU's for rendering with the pair of 480's nearly halving the render times of a single card. Having seen other benchmarks and stats I would make an educated guess that the pair would equal to or beat a single GTX 1080. What does it mean in the real world? Nothing. I found that on a real project the difference between all of the cards is negligible. I can add Lumetri, Film convert, do some scaling, add anything else thats accelerated and it might take the GPU to 20-40% when playing back a full resolution. Drop that to 1/2, and I can playback the clip with 10 gaussian blurs on it just fine with both the GTX 1070 and RX480. Rendering out a 13 minute video for a client is 30 seconds faster with the dual RX480's taking 10:41 compaired to the GTX 1070 at 11:16. I also like to stack clips in the time line when I edit and I found that I'll max out the CPU decoding the the multiple streams of XAVC before I come close to maxing the GPU. If I switch over to Resolve, the 1070 does better but only because I don't have Studio and can't use more than one GPU for rendering, Still the RX480 is usable for the same reasons it's usable in premiere. Maybe if I had a newer faster system things would be different. So in deciding between dual RX 480's or a GTX 1070, I lean toward the 1070. Cost is about the same but the Nvidia drivers seem to play better with Adobe, rendering is the only time the second GPU is useful (for me), and only if I have several effects that can take advantage. The 1070 also uses less energy and runs cooler. I like the idea of multiple graphics cards because I think we'll start seeing more software that can take advantage of it. By the time it's common place though, the next, next gen cards will be out and I'll be upgrading again anyway. Just sharing my experience with first world problems, hope it helpful and I welcome any feedback.
... View more