A case study on fixing stuttering in Adobe Premiere

I built a computer three weeks ago, with all fresh parts except for a video card I got on eBay. For 12 days it ran perfectly. Chewed through 4K footage. Then, for seemingly no reason, playback in Premiere became jarring; stuttering in such a way that it didn't feel like insufficient hardware, but potentially a defect of hardware (especially since I'd just built the thing). The abruptness of the issue both complicated and supported this theory.

Playback of (any) media outside of Premiere (including Audition) was also fine, which made me very suspicious of Premiere. It could have been a software-level issue. I deleted the media cache, adjusted the program RAM usage, re-installed my video card drivers, downgraded my video card drivers, downgraded Premiere to 23.5... but no luck. I reset my computer many, many times. The export of the sequence is fine, encoding fine. 3D gaming benchmarks have no apparent problem running, either.

I was perplexed. I've been working primarily in After Effects the past few weeks but can't imagine why this would have anything to do with just Premiere. I couldn't rule out hardware just yet. I ran some tests like nvidia-smi in Windows Powershell and GPU-Z to get a report on my VRAM usage and temperatures, but it doesn't appear like anything is out of the ordinary. No temperature throttling to speak of. Maybe I bought a lemon GPU? I slotted in an older 980ti video card to see if that made a difference. It seemed to work... for a while. But an hour later the problem re-emerged. I re-installed the eBay video card. Soon after I started having actual visual glitches appear. I returned the eBay video card, fearing the worst.

I replaced the video card once again, this time with a (working) modern video card, but the stuttering in Premiere persisted. I was sure that both of these older cards were in working condition... An hour later, my friend sent me this link. I had read so many guides about stuttering and they all seemed to lean on the idea of insufficient hardware. Couldn't be that... until I found this:

1. In Premiere go to Edit>Preferences>Audio Hardware

2. Change the Default Input to None

I had two, separate problems. One was a faulty GPU for reasons I discovered independent of my Premiere issue, but the other was Premiere's fault, though not exactly Premiere's fault. It was a driver issue I discovered soon after connecting the issue to faulty audio.

Poking around in Windows' Sound control panel I noticed some strange audio devices. I think what happened is Steam installed some kind of sneaky audio drivers for their remote streaming (you can remote connect into another computer running Steam to play games not installed on your computer), and this new driver was interfering with Premiere's hardware input. Premiere got the audio input twisted up somehow, and resulting in choppy playback (even for still frames). You wouldn't think that audio issues would corrupt playback on a thing like a still frame, but I do indeed believe that is what happened.

So this is my tale. Heed it well, and good luck on your editing journeys.