FAQ: Troubleshooting Intel iGPU systems with Premiere Pro

Report · Nov 11, 2019

Do you have a dual GPU systems that feature an Intel iGPU? Is your dual GPU setup not working as expected? Before doing anything rash, please check the following:

Make sure the discrete AMD or NVIDIA GPU is set in Project Settings > General for the Mercury Engine Playback Engine: CUDA or Metal are the typical settings.
If you are working with H.264 and HEVC material, hardware acceleration using the Intel iGPU is favored for decoding and encoding due to Intel Quick Sync technology. It is set correctly by default, but you can verify those here. You can also use the settings to disable Quick Sync decoding and encoding (not recommended when working with H.264 or HEVC footage).
Some GPU playback and accelerated process are still handled by the discrete GPU automatically when working with this footage, like GPU accelerated effects.
Update: the GPU now assists decoding and encoding if the format is H.264. Note that QuickSync, if available, is used in place of GPU decoding and encoding. It is more performant, typically.

If the expectation is that the discrete GPU should be more performant, that is not the case with H.264 and HEVC material because of Quick Sync.
If you are working with other material besides these formats, then the discrete GPU might be more performant.

Info regarding Video Drivers for the Intel iGPU

The 2019/2020 version of Premiere Pro (version 13.0 and later) requires a recent version of the Intel graphics driver.
We recommend updating your Intel drivers to the baseline drivers or above.
If you have a laptop from 2018 or earlier, you may not be able to use the Intel iGPU becauase the drivers are no longer available.

For more info on this topic, see:

Adobe Help Documentation: GPU Accelerated Rendering & Hardware Encoding.
Adobe Community article: FAQ: Everything you need to know about GPU use in Premiere Pro.

Report · Jun 08, 2020

For those editing HEVC or H.264 video files on Windows based machines with NVIDIA graphics, there is also another option to accelerate decoding other than Intel's iGPU / Quicksync decoding.

The free Turbocut Daniel2 plugin (available Adobe Exchange or directly at https://www.turbocut.com/ also adds NVIDIA accelerated HEVC and H.264 decoding capabilties next to various other features like worlds fastest video codec -> Daniel2, which is great for preview caching and ultrafast UHD, 8K (or higher res) editing.

But if you want the fastest way to hardware decode HEVC and H.264 using Nvidia GPUs, then Turbocut is your ticket right now. Give it a try. It's free.

Report · Jul 21, 2020

It's worth noting that too new of drivers seem to also cause issues. It would be great to know when Adobe plans on addressing this because while I could roll back to support Premiere and After Effects I would be condemning other important software I use.

See this thread for details... important bit is right at the bottom.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/green-lines-preview-a-bug/td-p/11189211?page=1

Report · Jul 21, 2020

I give props to Adobe for making use of Intel's Quick Sync and they should continue supporting it. Having said that there are other options.

https://youtu.be/l8qte40pykI

Report · Mar 20, 2021

I found interesting issue related to QuickSync decoding with Intel Graphics in while Premier playback/rendering and stucking with it more than one week by now: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/memory-growth-with-intel-hevc-decoder-acceleration-both-...

There seems to be something non-trivial. Would be fine if someone from Adobe could help with it or give some tools to track leaks, please...