Hardware encoding is unavailable premiere pro 2020

Moderator Note: Link removed. Sorry. Please do not use Console to change the application. It is against our corporate guidelines and is a request from Adobe Premiere Pro engineering.

I'm surprised they decided to support Intel's Quicksync before Nvidia' NVENC which apparently has better quality (1). As an alterntaive you can export to a somewhat lossless format like ProRes (HQ preferred) or to a true lossless format like Ut Video then compress using any other the free utilities that support other hardware accelerated encoders. For example Handbrake supports NVENC, AMD's VCE, and Intel Quicksync.  

source 1 - https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/comparison-of-x264-nvenc-quicksync-vce.57358/page-3#post-251456)

Make sure you have the latest driver installed and hareware encoding is checked in the Pref.

I'm having the same issue. The encoding selector is greyed out in Premiere Pro. I do have hardware acceleration in Media Encode through, and H.264 export is REALLY fast! Now if I could just get the same thing going in Premiere. 

UPDATE: Forget what I just said. I transcoded some ProRes files to H.264 MP4 in Media Encoder and that was really fast, but Queuing a sequence to ME and exporting an H.264 resulted in the same glacially-slow Media Encoder performance we all know and "love" - even though ME shows hardware acceleration is active. And I have a GTX1080 card and am runnning the latest Nvida driver, so everything should be working properly.  

I think I got it, at least on my end - I didn't notice but Windows opened previous installed version of Premiere, hence the feature not being available. When you open an old project with 14.2, it should ask you to update it for the new version - that's how you know. Or you can just check the "about" section in the menu to see the version number.

Once I launched 14.2, it worked! Test video that took me 16 seconds to export an hour ago now took 9 seconds with hardware encoding enabled.

The Mercury Acceleration setting in the Project dialog ... CUDA, Metal, Software Only ... doesn't currently have anything to do with H.264 encoding in an export.

The "Software encoding" line in the Summary for this version of Premiere only refers to whether or not you have an Intel CPU with the built-in QuickSync hardware available for the H.264 encoding process.

The Mercury Acceleration setting has to do with the use of GPU accelerated effects such as Warp Stabilizer, color correction, and frame-size changes.

Neil

Check this page if your hardware meets the specs required for Hardware encoding

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/gpu-acceleration-and-hardware-encoding.html#HardwareacceleratedEncodingDecodingIntelQuickSync