Heavy stutter on playback Premiere with Threadripper 1960x 16-core

Putting in my two cents here: I suffered the same issue with a new Threadripper 1950X machine. It seems to be a timing / scheduling issue involving Premiere's handling of the audio driver under AMD's implementation of 16/32-core multithreading. It's also possible that the problem only occurs in combination with a Nvidia GTX 10x0 GPU... or this could be a red herring related to those cards' popularity among editors buying Threadrippers in the past nine months.

In my case, the issue completely went away when I increased the I/O buffer in Premiere from 512 to 2048 (and increased the ASIO buffer in the ASIO drivers to 2048 as well; they might refer to the same buffer, but I'm not sure).

Note that you'll need to install ASIO drivers if you weren't already using them. Also, you'll have to restart Premiere for any change here to take effect, which initially tripped me up.

Both before and after the fix, it's clear that my initially "problematic" timelines weren't taxing the 1950X at all, giving me <5% CPU utilization with no spikes on fairly complex projects... all while being able to render some AE comps on the fly without any dropped frames.

And for fun, try lowering the Premiere I/O buffer to 64 and enjoy some really bizarre playback (repeating fragments, shots out of order). This suggests some crossed wires in PPro's implementation of multithreading, which doesn't bode well for the upcoming 32/64-core CPUs...

Try this,

it worked for me with 4K prores files on Windows.  In task manager, under details, right click on premiere pro.exe and change priority to normal.   It will probably be on High Priority by default..

It may not work for you, as I'm on an 18core Xeon, Premiere Pro Is very smooth for me now when running on normal priority.

I'm using the latest release 12.0.1 (build 59) and was getting similar issues. I was wondering if you applied any effects?

I've been having similar issues then I noticed that for some reason the hard limiter plugin was causing some really weird playback issues.

It might not solve your problem but could help identify some problematic effects?

You can always to to the following spots ... Bill Gehrke's Tweaker page/blog is the one place that has a real-time process to benchmark you computer while exporting a small provided Prpro project file so you get good data on what your system is doing front to back with PrPro ... read-times, RAM, CPU, GPU, all of it. That little project file is carefully designed to max out everything at some point in the process.

The Hardware forum is the PrPro forum for the digital video apps ... PrPro, AfterEffects, & Audition ... where the gear is the main topic. Bill & some other very good hardware folk 'hang out' there.

Neil

Tweaker's Page ... http://ppbm8.com/index.html

Hardware Forum ... https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum

What kind of media?