DISCUSS : NVIDIA GPU decode for H264 & HEVC

[Brajesh]

With the latest Adobe Premiere Pro Beta build (14.5.0_9 and later) we have enabled Hardware Accelerated Decoding through Nvidia GPU cards.

If you have Nvidia GPU card on your Windows machine, you will be able to use this feature.

Feature is enabled by default.  If it finds Nvidia GPU card it will start utilising it for decode.

Feature is enabled in Adobe Premiere Pro Beta , After Effects Beta, Adobe Media Encoder Beta and Adobe Premiere Rush.

Please let us know how it works for you. 

We are looking for feedback on playback, seeking, scrubbing, reverse playback and export.

Please try out the feature and share your feedback.

[johnpooley3]

Finally! I'm seeing good resource usage and no reported FramePrefetchLatency, but when scrubbing footage known to cause DVAFM-1026 it does still cause stuttering which makes scrubbing unusal. Clearing the Media Cache solves this for a short time. 

[Umang Mital]

Thanks for your feedback.

Good to hear that you are seeing good playback performance improvement.

Scrubbing performance depends on the media used, so for IPPP media, even after GPU Acceleration, there could be little delay when scrbbing at very high rate. This is due to file structure where all the frames need to be decoded for decoding a particular frame. But, in general scrubbing performance with Nvidia Decoding should be much better than Software Decoding.

[johnpooley3]

I have previously sent Bruce footage under DVAFM-1026. 

The footage causes Premiere to keep using the CPU for an extended amount of time after playback is stopped and to drop every frame during standard playback. This issue is temporarily resolved by clearing the media cache. 

Due to this bug, scrubbing performance of this media even with NVDEC is unacceptable while it plays fine in other applications. 

You are right that the GOP structure is generally IPPP, I haven't seen issues with footage that uses a lot of B frames. 

[Umang Mital]

Thanks for your feedback. 

I will check the clip attached in the bug and check the issue. Please help us with below information, (a) Are you seeing playback improvement with this clip and others after using Nvidia Decoding? (b) Scrubbing performance for even IPPP should be better with NVDEC, at least better than Software decoding. Are you seeing same performance with Nvidia decoding. 

[johnpooley3]

(a) With clips effected by DVAFM-1026, there is no noticeable improvement. With clips unaffected, the improvement is good and as expected. 

(b) Again, with clips effected by DVAFM-1026, there is no noticeable improvement. Any performance improvement is downstream of the bug which means it is negated by the bug. 

[demetrisag]

Even though performance is much better, it still need a lot to be desired, on same laptop RTX2070 8GB, Davinci resolve is 10 times smoother. is it because it's still not finilized? 

[Brajesh]

Thanks for the feedback! It would be good to understand why you feel Premiere is not as smooth as you would expect it would to be. Please share some detail.

[demetrisag]

Basically the way I understand it is, premiere takes a lot time  change to another clip and that affects scrubbing like a lot when there are many little clips in the timeline. basically it doesnt really do scrubbing.  But when I scrub on a singe clip without having to go through many clips it's really fast. While same timeline in resolve, same clips scrubs through them as if they were proxies.

[Umang Mital]

Thanks for your feedback. We will check this issue you reported. Would it be possible for you to share a sample project where we can reproduce this issue? Also, please help us with your feedback for playback/ reverse playback improvements with Nvidia Decoding.

[demetrisag]

literally any project with many short duration clips.  It's not an issue per se, it's more like the implimantation of nvdec is not very good. If you know daniel2, he has a plugin that makes premiere to use NVDEC, his plug in scrubs way better. Your implimantation is fine unless there are many short duration clips, then when you scrub through them it stacks, it's not responsive. It take a lot time to show a random clip in the preview monitor. for example if I have my timehead on a clip and then move it to another random clip further away, it take about 1-2 sec to show in program monitor whereas resolove does it instantenous 

[Umang Mital]

Thanks for your feedback.

We will check the issue with scrubbing performance in case of many short clips in the timeline.

Good to know that it works well and is very fast when you scrub within a single clip.

[demetrisag]

performance seems to be somewhat improved when I scrubb through many shorts clips in the timeline but compare to resolve there is room for a loot improvement. I am talking about sony a7ii xavc 50 frames codec.

[demetrisag]

4k editing though, even though it uses graphic card ncvdec decoder, it seems not to have any performance difference, scrubbing is very bad

[Brajesh]

Looking forward to more feedback on this. Please tell us specifically:

Are you getting improvement in playback, scrubbing, seeking, reverse playback?

Any issue you are getting with this feature enabled?

[scrozier]

Loaded up some old DJI Phantom 3 4k drone clips that used to bring Premiere to its knees but now they are playing back much smoother. A major improvement. 

Is it possible to also use this implementation for X-AVC-I and other h.264 family memebers? I notice it's only working for mp4/mov files and not being implemented for MXF wrapped H.264 or at least not Sony XAVC-I. The The fs7 is still an incredibly popular camera it would be nice to be able to decode that footage on the GPU!

Thanks!

[asafblasberg]

Yes, I tend to agree with johnpooly03, it's working (NVDEC), but scrubbing performance isn't great, and daniel's plug-in does scrubb much better. Also, there is a bug. When I park the playhead on a frame, the program monitor goes blank. The second i hit PLAY, the issue goes away. Same thing when doing multicam, but no question this is definitely a step in the right direction. When you playback in the timeline and don't scrub, performance is excellent!

[johnpooley3]

Thanks for bumping, I am very sure that this is a bug in the pipeline before the decoding process. It doesn't matter whether CPU, QuickSync, or NVDEC is being used. The only factor that changes how this media plays back is whether the Media Cache is clean. 

[MrSenpai]

Is there a way to double-check that this has in fact been enabled?

I know you said its automatically enabled by default but, in the past sometimes Premiere/ After Effects has failed to recognized GPU for some users (including me) so that's why I ask if there is some sort of setting or something that allows us to check that the GPU is being utilized for decoding. Let me know if there is. 

Also, question, does Hardware Accelerated decoding only help timeline performance for formats that are slow to decode, such as h.264, or does it also improve the performance of Intermediate Codecs like Apple ProRes?

What about when adding effects to a clip, does the new Hardware decoding improve performance with clips that have heavy effects enabled? 

[demetrisag]

Guys what are you doing with this update? 4k editing suffers, it suffers even with proxies.. 1080p its much better but resolve is flying compared to premiere. I feel you don't really dedicate much efforts on this feature and even more weird even though it's voted at highest request ever, not really many people here are commenting 

[Paul PF Films]

This is a massively wanted and needed feature.  A lot of users have switched to Resolve because it is extremely well optimised and will leverage a GPU for encoding and decoding.  Great to see the dev team working on this!  

[dimba83]

Finally the feature I was waiting for. If i scrub through HEVC 1080p50 from a Canon XF 705 it still drops frames but heck thats totally fine, i dont need to see 100 or 200 frames a second. The playback lag and stuttuering is gone. Even tho i dont see and Decode in TaskManager, its just faster. Thank you for that update.

[dimba83]

Sorry for the typos.

[dimba83]

Ok, I gotta correct my post. Aactually imported the wrong file (converted to another codec, same filename). Tried the h265 now and It's almost identical as with the previous version. I have a 00:00:13:22 file in a 50fps sequence. Of these 672 Frames a third (~230}are dropped frames. 
Changing the renderer to "Software only" in the Project Settings doenst make it slower. Its as if the GPU isnt used at all. Task Manager also doesnt show anything, GPU Overall Usage is 9% during playback but the Video Decode stays at 0%

My setup is not top of the line but should well handle it though

x99-Mainboard
i7-6800k

RTX2070

32GB Ram 

Footage in this case on the m.2 System Drive

[Lancer X]

My new drone is a Mavic Air 2.  I shot a project in 4K H.265, but when I finished editing, I was unable to export the project.  All video sequences just looked like still frames (probably the first frame from each clip).

In desperation to save the project, I installed the Premiere Pro Beta, and it exported the project with no problems (fwew!).  Likewise, it seemed much smoother when scrubbing through the footage.  My GPU is a GeForce GTX 1050.