CC 2020 (and 2019) dropping frames and stuttery playback (RTX 3090)

[j50893909]

Threadripper 1920x 12-core 3.5GHz

64 GB ram

RTX 3090

Dedicated media NVM.e Samsung 970 evo

9 times out of 10, playback is suboptimal. If I switch workspaces, sometimes it fixes it but it's a temporary fix that only last til the playback stops.

[j50893909]

Going from Vega64 to RTX 30 series was suppose to provide a significant boast in performance. Somehwere along the line of 30% improvement according to various benchmark sites and articles online from reputatble sources. It's one of (if not) the main reasons I upgraded. I also spend most of time in Premiere and after effects. I came over from Avid several years ago because of how advanced Premiere was by comparison. Unfortunately, it looks like Premiere is falling behind. This card screams on Resolve but I'd prefer to keep my current workflow on Premiere. Especially seeing as most the places I work at still use it exclusively. That being said, if I can't get it working, I might be forced over.

[mandicreally]

Agreed.  The ONLY improvement I've seen in Premiere is export times.  Which I've done a couple of rather large projects since I got the card so it was a saving grace for that.  But Premiere is terrible at using the horsepower a computer has on offer.  I too am too settled into my Premiere workflow.  I would have switched to Resolve ages ago if I could get used to the User Interface. I work on 3 monitors in Premiere and like having that real estate.  Going back to a single monitor is infuriating.  

[Andy 1968]

Depending on the audio devices the ASIO4ALL can sometimes help. I would try ASIO4AL drivers.

[Michael L at UNCP]

To sum up...

You're experiencing dropped frames and stuttery playback on a system with

Threadripper 1920x 12-core 3.5GHz

64 GB ram

RTX 3090

Dedicated media NVM.e Samsung 970 evo

Software

Running the latest studio driver 461.40

Windows 10 Version 20H2

Premiere Version 2020 14.8.0 (Build 39) - Audio Preferences set to 'no input'

Updating the motherboard bios made things slightly worse.

Updating Nvidia drivers didn't help.

Changing from default audio to motherboard audio  or no input helped a little

Disabling gsync in Nvidia control pannel helped a little left playback choppy but took your PugetBench from 729 up to 744.

Moving the media to several different very fast drives made no improvement and your cache files are on equally fast drives.

Your monitor is Freesync (not Gsync) and you've disabled that. Playback still choppy but raised your PugetBench.

Switching from Metal to OpenGL in the project settings didn't help.

You've tried different codecs, including Prores.

You're only expering this in Premiere.

Maybe someone can review that and think of what we've missed.

My thoughts....

I've been working on some assumptions that may be a mistake.

Do you have any plugins or add-ons installed in Premiere?

Are we talking about stuttery playback on an unaltered clip or are there effects applied?

What happens if you right click on a clip (one with stuttery playback) in the Project Panel, select "New Sequence from Clip" and delete the audio? This would produce a sequence with settins that match your clip and no audio to deal with. How does that play?

[j50893909]

Yes, that pretty much sums it up. I haven't tried your solution yet but I am working on another that seems to be promising. I say that because it's gotten 2019 to play with no drop frames and 2020 to work with minimal dropped frames. I also say it's promising and not a solution (yet) because I want to replicate it and be able to restart the computer and try multiple projects / media to make sure it truly fixed it. I'd also love not to have any dropped frames in 2020 but i'd settle for this if it lasts.

I'll post an update as soon as I've run some tests.

[j50893909]

Unfortunately my fix was not a permanent solution. As soon as I restarted, it went right back to stuttering. Such a bummer cause it was amazing to see it play back buttery smooth.

[j50893909]

So, I've discovered if I reinstall the driver (and don't restart) than it plays back in 2019 with at most 3 dropped frames, sometimes none. The second I restart, we go back to the stutter.

I've also now removed all start up services and startup items that aren't essential. I thought this was the solution at first (it was not). I didn't realize I tried two things simultaneously.

I obviously can't keep reinstalling the driver every time before I open premiere so don't know what to do here. It's so frustrating to know it can run smooth with this equipment and then it doesnt

[j50893909]

CORRECTION TO THE LAST REPLY:

I do have to restart and then I get 0 dropped frames. But if i restart again after that, that's when things break again.

[basil1891]

Sounds like Windows is auto-updating (or rolling back?) driver for whatever reason. How to disable this:

https://www.minitool.com/news/disable-automatic-driver-updates-win-10-009.html

[j50893909]

I'm absolutely going to disable that but would it still show the same driver number? 461.40?

[Michael L at UNCP]

Still stabbing into darkness...

You mentioned that you'd updated your video card. Is it possible that there are remenants of the previous card's drivers lingering in the OS that are interfering with the new drivers? This sounds like the kind of thing that could happen on a reboot.

It might go something like this...

  - You install the drivers.

  - Reboot to complete the installation and it runs well.

  - Reboot again and the OS doesn't have anything from the new driver installation to run so it falls back on some default loading activity that involves fragments of a previous driver?

Could it be possible to remove the current video card, re-install the old card and driver, and look to see if there's a utility to do a complete removal of that driver to a generic maybe VGA driver or somethin innocuous, THEN do the install of the new card and new driver?

It would probably be a good idea for someone with more experience here to weigh in before going through these steps but this is the kind of thing I'd have done back when I was building systems (ages ago, so not sure it's still a thing).

[j50893909]

Well... that was not fun. I used AMD cleanup utility to complete remove anything having to do with the previous video card. Windows was not a fan of this and for a while refused to acknowledge there was any videocard installed. I got that all fixed so now back where I started with 3090 installed, latest studio driver etc. Still getting dropped frames. And now the install driver trick isn't working to cure the dropped frames temporarily. Also, gpu still working great everywhere besides premiere.

[Michael L at UNCP]

Sorry you went through that.

There's a SOLVED post here with some interesting information about monitor settings, including resolution, affecting stutter.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/premiere-pro-2020-choppy-stuttering-playback-in-program-...

And, here's an odd one, two people who had issues with stuttery playback in Premiere Elements when they put Clips with 44.kHz audio into sequences with 48.0kHz settings. It's not Premiere Pro but still something odd affecting playback in a way I would not have expected. Makes me wonder, again, doing a "New Sequence from Clip" and seeing if that stutters. https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-elements/choppy-stuttering-playback-in-timeline-preview-prem...

[j50893909]

Tried 'New Sequence from Clip" and still stutters. Removing the audio or using a clip that only has video, still stutters. In terms of resolution, I'm on windows so Easyres doesn't work but I have tried different resolutions to no avail. What is interesting is that sometimes by switching workspaces or resizing the size of the program window, the playback / dropped frames does improve.

I'm working with an ultrawide monitor at 3840 x 1600. I also have a secondary monitor for playback running at 3840x2160. This setup worked well with the Vega64 but now even without playback to the second monitor, it struggles on Premiere.

[Michael L at UNCP]

I'm becoming more curious about the interaction between video card and monitor. Would you post the makes and models of your monitors?

[j50893909]

Acer XR382CQK

BenQ BL2711U

[Michael L at UNCP]

Both of those begin to require and HDMI 2.0 cable around those resolutions, depending on the refresh rate. but the card specs say HDMI 2.1 cables.

Something to check. I don't know why that would affect ONLY Premiere but you've mentioned that resizing windows and changing desktop can affect playback so, maybe one or more underspeced cables.

You might try stepping those monitors down as a step in troubleshooting. Both monitors can accept a lower resolution/refresh if the cables are a lower standard.

Maybe try the Acer at 1920x1080@60Hz 

It looks like you're using the  BenQ at 3840x2160. Check the refresh rate and try 30Hz (not 60Hz) or step it down to 2560x1440@60Hz or lower.

Manuals:

Acer- https://benqesupport.blob.core.windows.net/esupport/LCD%20Monitor/UserManual/BL2711U/BL2711U_RF_EN.p...

BenQ - https://www.benq.com/en-us/support/downloads-faq/products/monitor/bl2711u/manual.html

RTX 3090 - couldn't find one. looked at specs - https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090/

[j50893909]

So even though everything else that gets pumped to the monitor through the displayport cable looks and runs great, I'd need more bandwith for it coming out of Premiere? I'm trying to follow. Isn't it pumping out the same number of pixels at the same rates? Why would Premiere itself be more data intensive on the video out? 

Look, to be frank, at this point with the weird quirks I've experienced in Premiere, I wouldn't rule it out but at the same time I'm skeptical. Especially cause I have tried lowering the resolution of the monitor and seeing if that improved playback which it did not in premiere.

[basil1891]

Have you tried with a single monitor only? Worth to check I think

[j50893909]

Yes, tried working off only the lower resolution one (the Acer) as I thought not pushing as many pixels might help.

I tired with transmit turned off to the second monitor and with the monitor physically turned off just in case so the gpu didn't waste any processing power on that second one.

[Michael L at UNCP]

I don't blame you. It's all a bit weird.

I don't know enough about programing to understand how Premiere's interactions with the video signal are different than everything else. To me that sounds more like a codec/encoder/decoder issue. Why would Resolve handle the same clip fine while Premiere struggles with it? Why would resizing the window affect playback?

To me it mostly points to a software issue but when everything else doesn't work, I start tearing into details and looking for weaknesses in the chain.  One strategy is to remove as many components as possible and see if things work, if they do, add components back one at a time until it breaks again.  Another strategy is to lower the demands on the system until things work and then incrementally increase demands, one thing at a time, until things break. You have some very high-end equipment there and sometimes those things can be a little less forgiving and a little more quirky.

On the other hand, I can get a little obsessed with finding a solution and sometimes that takes me into some odd corners. It's not for everyone. Nothing wrong with that. I sometimes waste a lot of time tracking down things that might not be worth the effort. Now and then, though, I stuble on something unexpected.

I may have reached the end of my usefulness here but I wish you good luck and I'll follow along. I'm curious to see how this one shakes out.

[j50893909]

I truly appreciated all your time and all your suggestions. They have all been very valid and definately have pointed me to some places i wouldn't have otherwise thought to look. And even though it didn't solve this issue, those are useful tricks to know and things to look for.

Unless someone else can provide any other suggestions, I'm going to (sigh) do a clean install this weekend. I dread doing this cause of re-installing all the software and whatever obscure plugins I picked up along the way (non premiere) that I might have to reinstall. It's a hassle as you can imagine but if that solves this once and for all, it'll be worth it. I'm just going to be annoyed if I do all that and run into the same thing.

If that doesn't solve it, I might pick up a new cable or two and do some test on that. Hoping it doesn't come to that.

I hear you about the high end equipment being more finicky. I can attest to this. But when it works, its glorious. And once it works, unless something changes, it continues working. At the moment, it's got me yanking my hairs out.

The thing that gets me is why does it work sometimes when the size of the program monitor or premiere window changes. Or when I change from certain workspaces to others (but not all of them). I've also read some people with this (or similar) issues are able to get it to play smoother through their source monitor but not program monitor.

I wish there was a replicatable event that triggers it working (or not working). That's why I was excited about the driver install solution cause I at least could rely on reinstalling the driver and having it work for that session. But even that's not something that works everytime.

[basil1891]

You may want to do a system backup prior that, just in case you know.

Links to free OEM versions of Acronis True Image

https://www.reddit.com/r/acronis/comments/aqlp0x/free_oem_versions_of_acronis_true_image_software/

[j50893909]

Absolutely. Thanks @basil1891 

[Chris_Olson]

Why is no one asking what the source material is?

Can you tell us what footage you are editing? What camera is it from, resolution, frame rate, codec.