EGPU Not Being Utilized By Premiere Pro (Mac Mini)

Report · Jun 23, 2022

I'm currently editing a project in Premiere that is pretty extensive, and it feels like I'm trudging through mud. My timline scrubbing is laggy & choppy, footage with slightly taxing effects only makes that (unnecessarily) worse. I'm using proxies for all the footage (DSLR & OBS files), which only helps a little bit.

While editing, I’ll watch my activity monitor to see how much the EGPU is being used vs. the internal graphics card. It looks like Premiere is jumping back and forth between both graphics cards, instead of mainly utilizing my EGPU. (I'd obviously prefer the EGPU being used 100%)

So basically, Premiere isn’t properly utilizing my EGPU. How do I fix this?

***Just gonna go ahead and list the things I've done to help resolve this issue***

I have made sure the Premiere Pro application is set to “Prefer EGPU”

I've tried changing the "Preview File Format" (under sequence settings). Not much change, everthing seemed worse than the default "I-Frame Only MPEG"

I've recently cleard the cache Media Cache, did't notice a change after restarting the program.

I’ve also already downgraded my version of Premiere to 15.4.5 from whatever the current version is (as per someone’s solution in another Adobe Community Forum). I would downgrade my project file to an even older version of Premiere (like 2020 or 2019), but Premeire 15.0 is the earliest I can convert a project file to.

I've tried switching the USB-C port that my EGPU is using. Restarting my EGPU doesn't seem to help either.

****

I don't believe that it's the graphics card itself, I play games on my from time to time and it seems to run just fine. If anyone has any ideas/insight on how I could improve this, I'd really, really appreciate it!

*** My Specs***

Premiere Pro 15.4.5

Mac mini (2018)

3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

Radeon RX 580 8 GB (Razor Core X Chroma EGPU)

Report · Jun 27, 2022

IS anyone out there????

Report · Jun 27, 2022

You have a unique setup with an esoteric issue on an old version of Pr.

Not many folks are going to be able to help you with that, and so they don't post.

I would upgrade to the latest version of Pr (22.5) and work on troubleshooting the choppy playback. It may not involve the EGPU at all. Or the EGPU may be causing the problem.

Do you have any other external devices on the same bus as the EGPU? Have you tried editing without the EGPU plugged in at all?

Report · Jun 27, 2022

@Samuel5EFD wrote:

IS anyone out there????

We are out here…we just might not have any good ideas. I was using an eGPU with the same RX580 with Premiere Pro on a 2018 Intel Mac last year, before I got an Apple Silicon Mac. I was using a different brand of eGPU enclosure though. Version 15 was current then, so I must have been using that with the eGPU.

It mostly worked fine. But...like you say, there were some times when Premiere Pro would mysteriously not use the eGPU during a render, according to Activity Monitor. Sometimes it would, other times it just would not. Switching back and forth, like you said. But I never got to the bottom of it before picking up an Apple Silicon Mac where I no longer needed an eGPU and Apple Silicon doesn’t support it anyway.

Mostly I’m posting in case it helps to confirm that you are not the only one who has seen that random switching behavior.

eGPUs may be dropping in testing priority for a lot of Mac software developers. We eGPU users were a small niche to begin with, and getting smaller, because almost all the new Macs that would benefit the most from an eGPU are now Apple Silicon where an eGPU isn’t supported.

Report · Jun 28, 2022

I do understand that this is a unique setup, and with that will come unique problems. It just kinda sucks that I feel like i'm spending as much time editing as I am problem solving.

Whenever I first got my Mac Mini and the encloser, I was getting amazing performance. Lighting fast renders, and also could blaze through a video timeline with a lot of taxing effects without a single stutter. That was around 2 years ago and I'm not currently working as an Editor, just doing side projects. I know at least under the right circumstances (right OS, Version Of Premiere) It worked very well.

I'm going to keep searching though, hopfully I'll a fix/right circumstance for this setup to run!

Thank you for your feedback! (Glad to hear it's not just my sytem that is behaving this way)

Report · Jun 28, 2022

I use a similar eGPU on my i9 macbook pro and a similar MacMini. Works fine with Premiere and Resolve. Not so much with After Effects. What MacOS are you on? I'm on 12.4 on both and have been using version 22.x extensively the past months.

Report · Jun 28, 2022

Currently on Big Sur 11.2.3, Premiere v15.0

I guess I can try a OS update and run a current version of Premiere, I downgraded my version of Premiere several months ago (as sugested in another support forum, and that improved the issue at that time).

If you are running with that similar of equiptment, I guess I'll try that next. I've been a bit weary of OS updates in the past. I had a bad experience when updating to Big Sur, I could only run the Beta version of Premiere (pretty bad performance) for several months.

Thank you!