CUDA or software only?

Natantantan  wrote I just have a simple question. For all my rendering needs, whether its Premiere or Media Encoder, should I use Mercury GPU acceleration (CUDA) or Mercury software only.

Software Only is usually the slowest of all options. You'd use Software Only if there aren't any other choices because you're on a computer that doesn't have any hardware that works with graphics acceleration, or if there is a bug with the graphics hardware/driver that doesn't happen when set to Software Only.

Natantantan  wrote I don't know if I'm supposed to have more options but those are the only two I have.

The number of options listed can be different depending on the computer. A cheap laptop might only show Software Only. A computer with supported integrated graphics and discrete graphics might show two or more choices (like Software Only and OpenCL), and if Nvidia graphics are present then you see a CUDA choice.

In your case you should choose CUDA because if there aren't any problems with it, it should be much faster than Software Only.

If you see multiple choices for GPU acceleration, test to see which one is faster on your computer. The combination of graphics card, VRAM, driver version, system RAM, CPU cores, cache drive speed, etc. can tilt Mercury Playback Engine performance one way or the other so don't assume one way is always the fastest on all computers.