Version 26.2.2 (Build 3) Renderer menu is greyed out with Mercury Playback Engine Software Only selected.

I am experiencing a similar issue. I am using Media Encoder 2026 (version 26.2.2 - Build 3), and my device is a Lenovo LOQ, Intel Core i7-12650HX, RTX 4050 Laptop, and 16 GB RAM. GPU rendering is disabled. When I go to preferences, I can enable GPU rendering, but the render always fails in the middle of the process. I have already changed drivers, but it didn't solve the problem.

I was facing the same issue, with version 26.2 on my RX580. as Pointed out by ​@Taseer123@ I tried opening the preferences and close it without making any changes and it worked for me. 

Working with an RTX 4080 Super, I had GPU acceleration working in Premiere, but not Media Encoder. I think the solution that worked for me was to clear the Media Encoder cache. I can’t tell you for certain because I went to export a clip later in the day after trying a few things and I noticed that GPU acceleration was restored. It seems like the most likely solution for my situation.

Is there a solution? Also experiencing this on ASUS G16 and G18

I’m experiencing the same issue with an NVIDIA RTX 5080.

At the moment, this bug prevents me from fully taking advantage of my GPU in the same software, especially in workflows where hardware acceleration is important. Since the RTX 5080 is a recent high-end graphics card, I hope this issue can be fixed as soon as possible in a future update.

Thank you to everyone who is reporting and documenting this problem. 

Thanks for sharing the workaround. I can confirm that opening Preferences and then closing the window without making any changes also restores Hardware Acceleration on my system. This seems more like a bug in the current version rather than a GPU or driver issue, especially since CUDA and NVENC work correctly in other applications. Hopefully Adobe can reproduce and address this in a future update.

I’m having the same issue

When rendering a Premiere Pro project, trying to change de “Performance” option to “Hardware Encoding” is not possible as it is greyed out at “Software Encoding”

I have tried Main profile with 4.1 and 4.2 levels as sugested by searches, but none of the combinations of profile and level seems to enable it.

This happens both on Media Encoder and Premiere Pro

I have a Nvidia 4060ti GPU, latest Studio Drivers, CUDA Toolkit instaled (I even did a gpu driver clean install with ddu), reinstalled premiere and media encoder, and nothing seems to change this.

I can still render with nvenc through ffmpeg, wich tells me that the problem might not be the GPU itself.

How can we solve this?

I have the same issue on the same build. I have read elsewhere this and purged cache from after effects then cuda encoding came back.

However , after queing and rendering multiple sequences through after effects, i believe media encoder swtiched to software rendering along the queue as renders and gpu usage slow down significantly. 

The first time I am hearing about this issue. Would you be able to do a screen recording?

I am having the same problem. I work on three separate workstations and two of them with windows OS are having this problem regardles of updating the drivers.

WHAT WORKS: Just going to the Preferences tab in the Media Encoder and shutting the tab down without changing literally anything. Boom, the renderer is back on hardware acceleration.