Adobe Premiere Pro 14.3.0 not Using AMD Vega 11 GPU

[gettogupta]

Hello

Following is my system configuration

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega 11 Graphics

MB: Asrock B450M Steel Legend

RAM: 16GB DDR4

HDD: 512 NVMe

OS: Win 10 Pro

I am trying to edit a 4K video, following details from VLC player.

Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)

Premiere Pro is not utilizing the GPU and only the CPU is being used for playback of the video in Premiere Pro. However when I use VLC mediaplayer, the GPU seems to be doing most of the work and the CPU is running at 4-5% approx. 

How can I get Premiere Pro to utilize the GPU? 

Under Project settings : Mercury Play Back Engine OpenCL is selected. 

[RjL190365]

I am very sorry to tell you this, but Premiere Pro does not currently support decoding of H.264 or HEVC video with a discrete GPU or a non-Intel GPU. You will need VCN decoding support for that 2400G. Until Adobe implements that, you are currently stuck with software-only decoding.

[gettogupta]

Hi, 

Thanks for the reply and for clarifying. So if I were to get a Nvidia GTX1650 based card will this be resolved? Or my being on a AMD processor will still be a problem. 

Considering H.264 is pretty much a stadard these days, this looks like a rather large miss by Adobe. 

[RjL190365]

Adobe does not currently support NVDEC either. Only Intel QuickSync is currently supported at all for decoding.

However, since version 14.2, Premiere Pro and Media Encoder can use most discrete Nvidia and AMD GPUs for exporting to H.264 or HEVC.

[gettogupta]

Thanks again. Does that mean with my current AMD 2400G setup, there is nothing I can do to playback 4K videos lag free and edit them? 

That doesnot sound right!!

As mentioned I am on 16GB DDR4 and 512GB NVMe HDD - cant improve much on those. 

[RjL190365]

You have only a 4-core/8-thread CPU that is actually weaker than even a 3.5-year-old quad-core Intel i7 CPU, let alone a newer Ryzen 3000 series CPU. As such, your system just does not have enough horsepower to edit 4k video. You actually need an 8-core/16-thread or better CPU in order to handle 4k smoothly. Sorry, but that is how NLEs work, which is completely different from what a simple media player handles video playback.

And to prove the above point, I looked at Puget Systems' benchmark results with various CPUs and GPUs, many of which are user-submitted. Systems that were configured like yours in its current state, I'm sorry to say, delivered some of the very worst scores out of all systems that were ever tested in the Premiere Pro tests. In fact, they scored even worse than any of the Intel systems that were only equipped with the integrated Intel HD graphics!  The only systems that scored worse than that are those with CPUs that were more than 10 years old.

[RjL190365]

I have just seen a new result with your CPU and integrated GPU setup (albeit with a different motherboard, chipset and storage configuration). As it turned out, the extremely poor scores that I saw were with a lesser Ryzen 3 G-series APU and Vega 8 graphics. The one with the 2400G and Vega 11 graphics scored fairly respectably, with the biggest bottleneck being the export score (probably because that system had a slow HDD instead of an SSD for the projects/media/exports drive). Live playback score was typical for a 4-core/8-thread CPU that was three years old (the vintage that the original Zen architecture dated from). Your 2400G, despite being numbered in the 2000-series, actually used the first-generation Zen architecture of the Ryzen 1000-series CPUs. Similarly, the Ryzen 3000G series used the Zen+ architecture of the 2000-series CPUs rather than the Zen2 architecture of the non-G 3000-series CPUs.

I hope this helps you match the GPU to your CPU.