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Participant
May 5, 2020
Question

RX 580 8GB working really bad in Premiere Pro CC 2019

  • May 5, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 19360 views

Hello!

So, i had the GTX 750 Ti 2GB and i upgraded to RX 580 8GB XFX. I tested in Premiere Pro CC 2019 my new GPU. But the playback is so much slow than before and i dont know why. After Effects is working well, but in Premiere is terrible.I already selected the "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)".

My specs:

RX 580 8GB XFX

Ryzen 5 1600

16GB RAM

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!

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1 reply

Legend
May 5, 2020

The reason for such lousy performance with the RX 580 is that OpenCL is, frankly, effectively "depreciated" throughout the entire tech industry. You see, outside of experiments the official OpenCL specification (from the consortium that maintains OpenCL) has not been updated significantly since 2012. That meant that even the Radeon RX 5000-series Navi GPUs (the current generation) are bound by those ancient support rules (your RX 580 is now two full GPU generations old, being of the Polaris architecture which predated the Vega architecture that came in between Polaris and Navi). And Adobe's relative lack of performance and support for OpenCL shows. Slow performance and corrupted renders are two of the biggest problems. In other words, even with the most powerful GPU, OpenCL performance in Premiere Pro is lackluster at best.

 

Sadly, the only way to break this lackadaisical OpenCL support and performance throughout the software industry for AMD GPUs is for AMD itself to come up with a Windows-compatible proprietary API that's comparable to Nvidia's CUDA to replace OpenCL. AMD, unfortunately, is currently unwilling to do that, so it's stuck with OpenCL in Windows for the foreseeable future. The only other alternative that's available for AMD is to completely omit GPGPU processing support, which would permanently force Premiere Pro into the software-only rendering mode.

 

And since all Nvidia's lower-end GPUs at the same relative performance level up to and including Pascal are not worth their current street prices for the relative sideways-grade from your current GTX 750 Ti, the only fix would be a brand-new GeForce card of the Turing architecture. That means the GTX 1600 series. And with that first-generation 6-core/12-thread Ryzen that's currently in your system, I would recommend only two GPUs within that GTX 1600 series (depending on your budget): The GTX 1650 SUPER or the non-SUPER GTX 1660. (Nvidia does not offer a GPU that's in the RX 580's price range that has more than 6 GB of VRAM.) Anything else above it is quite overkill (including the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, the least expensive Nvidia GPU that's equipped or available with 8 GB of VRAM).

Participant
May 5, 2020

Oh, ok. I didn't know that. Thanks for the answer!

Legend
May 6, 2020

No problem. OpenCL support is spotty at best in Adobe's Premiere Pro anyway, as Adobe has several GPU rendering features that are not supported in Version 2.0 of the OpenCL standard, which came out in 2013. And all recent AMD Radeon GPUs are bound to version 2.0 of the OpenCL standard - that's much longer than Nvidia's most recent major update of CUDA, which dates from the end of 2018.

 

And now I know why Adobe had effectively disabled OpenCL support when an Nvidia GPU is the sole GPU installed in a given PC: The available GeForce Game Ready and Studio Drivers (and yes, even the 445.87 Game Ready and the 442.92 Studio drivers) officially support only OpenCL 1.2, which dated all the way back to the end of 2011. OpenCL 2.0 or higher support is required to enable OpenCL GPU acceleration - and even then, it is bound by the six-year-old rules. No wonder why OpenCL performance is so lackluster.