Feature Focus: Windows Intel HW Decode performance improvement for H264/HEVC

[Brajesh]

We have improved Decode performance on Intel  Windows machine for H264 and HEVC. 

You should see improved playback, seek and scrub performance on Beta builds. Reverse playback performance is also improved.

Make sure HW preference to enable this feature is enabled. It is supposed to be enabled by default.

Steps to enable Hardware-accelerated Decoding:

• Navigate to Preferences > Media 
• Select Enable hardware accelerated decoding (requires restart)
• Restart Adobe Premiere Pro

Refer to this page for Intel HW decode system requirement.

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html#hardware-acceleration-system-requir...

Please try out and let us know how it is working on latest Beta builds.

Thanks

Brajesh

[johnpooley3]

Please please please put some time into fixing the H.264 LongGOP decoding FramePrefetchLatency bug DVAFM-1026 I’ve given Mitch and Bruce more sample footage than they want it happens in Software Only and with HW accelerated decode

[Kevin-Monahan]

What cameras are you seeing this on in the community, John? Drone footage? 

[johnpooley3]

DJI drone footage mostly, also ABC Newsone wire footage (not CNN notably), my personal dashcam does it

Seems to be a large number of consecutive P frames with no B frames that freaks it out. Clearing the Media Cache alleviates the issue temproarily. You'll see high CPU and disk usage for a while after you stop playback in Premiere too. 

We've seen great advancements in VFR performance in the latest versions so kudos for that, sometimes Premiere handles it better than even FFMPEG, but DJI footage cut better in 2018 than it does in current versions and that's undoutably a bug. 

[asafblasberg]

any progress on H264 hardware accelerated decoding support for nvidia cards? 

[Koroku92]

I can say without doubt that decoding support for Nvidia cards is non-existant... I'm on a very powerful machine (16 core Ryzen CPU + RTX 3090 GPU) and the GPU decoder is not being used while editing in Premiere. The timeline is actually LAGGY when scrubbing x264 or HVEC mp4 files.

I've heard that the feature only really works on Intel CPU's with Quicksync, which is very dissapointing. I would have expected better from such expensive software.

I have to transcode all my x264 or x265 media to Prores Proxies to get 'acceptable' performance on the timeline. Meanwhile my GPU sits at 0% utilisation on the decoder chip. It sucks. Makes my workflow very inefficient, if decoding worked, I wouldn't have to spend time and resources encoding prores proxies in my workflow.

It's very dissapointing.

[asafblasberg]

That's strange - Premiere Pro does offer decoding -  I have RTX 4070 Ti. Have you tried DaVinci Resolve to compare?

[Koroku92]

It seems to me that it 'pretends' to offer decoding (the setting is there and is ON) but it does not work. I can see in task manager that my CPU is working hard, my GPU decode is at 0% and my timeline is laggy playing back files that should be supported by premiere and my GPU decoder.

I have poor performance with x264/HVEC files in the timeline when the performance should be EXCELLENT for my machine if Premiere utilised the resources of my machine properly. Meanwhile, people with lesser Intel rigs or M1 Macbooks with less ram have superior performance to me in the timeline.

I just tried enabling and disabling decoding in Premiere and it had 0 effect.

Perhaps the feature worked once upon a time but it's never worked for me.

[MisterAdvent]

How current is your nVidia driver?

[Koroku92]

Latest studio drivers.

[Koroku92]

I know a lot of people ditching Adobe for Davinci resolve due to faster editing performance. I think the hardware decode contributes to this.