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caroline_edits
Community Manager
caroline_editsCommunity Manager
Community Manager
April 7, 2020
Question

FAQ: How to update your GPU driver on Windows

  • April 7, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 5765 views

 

What's a driver?

Think of a driver as a translator between your computer and the applications you have installed on it. In Premiere, when you hit the space bar to play the footage in your timeline, the application yells out to the operating system, "Hey, play the video back!"
The operating system uses the hardware resources in your computer to play the footage, so the OS talks to the driver and says "Hey, make the graphics card play the video back." The driver translates that message, asks the GPU to kick in, and the footage plays. With an out of date driver, your operating system and your graphics card are speaking different languages!

 

What does Premiere use my GPU for?
Lots of different processes. Playback, scaling, color adjustments. Here's a list of GPU-accelerated effects in Premiere!

 

Here's the walkthrough.

  1. Open the task manager. You can do this in a lot of different ways, but the fastest is to right-click on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen and select "task manager."
  2. Go to the performance tab in the task manager to see your hardware usage. This is where we'll identify what kind of GPU you have!
  3. Select the GPU from the lefthand side of the task manager.
    • If you don't see "GPU" on the lefthand side of your screen, it means that you have a piece of hardware that's a hybrid CPU/GPU. No worries at all! Reach out to us here and we'll help you out. 
  4. Identify the make and model of your GPU. I've listed some examples below!
    • AMD Radeon Pro W5500
    • NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070 
    • Intel® HD Graphics 6000 
  5. Google search the name of your graphics card plus "latest driver" to navigate to your card manufacturer's website.

6. Download the latest driver from your manufacturer's website.

7. Open the download. From there, it'll walk you through the installation!

 

You can also reach out to us on Twitter @AdobeCare and we'll help out!


Caroline

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

L
Libertybelle2016
Participant
July 9, 2020

Yesterday I hit this after upgrading Premier. I have an Intel® HD Graphics 6000 adapter, and I've followed Intel's site, as instructed above, and used Intel's driver updater to ensure I have their latest driver. It installed 15.40.45.5126. However, when I launch Premier, I still get this compatibility error. The Fix button leads to a driver that gives an error on the installation: "Your system does not meet the minimum requirements". Now Premier is down.

 

 

R
RjL190365
Legend
July 9, 2020

I am very sorry to tell you this, but Adobe has not updated its OpenCL Windows and its Integrated Graphics sections in the "Recommended graphics cards" list since 2017, when Premiere Pro CC 2018 was released. However, beginning with Premiere Pro 2019, the minimum system requirements have changed. Adobe now officially requires a 6th-Generation (Skylake) or newer Intel CPU just to even run properly. The HD Graphics 6000 is a giveaway that your CPU is only a 5th-Generation Intel CPU (Broadwell), whose support from Intel itself had already been placed into "Legacy" status prior to the release of Premiere Pro 2019. {Newer CPUs have integrated graphics with only three-digit-long model numbers, such as the UHD Graphics 630 that debuted with Coffee Lake (8th-Generation) and continues into the present-day Comet Lake (10th-Generation).} And Intel is one of the sneakier companies in this regard: Apparently they only share this information with computer OEMs and software companies, and do not share any of this info directly to consumers. And the OEMs and software companies are not required to reveal this information.

 

No wonder why hardware compatibility is a mess right now.

 

In the case of Adobe, it will only run properly when absolutely nothing at all whatsoever that's legacy or obsolete (hardware- and driver-wise) is inside that system. This also applies to older drivers that support hardware that's still in mainstream support but included support for legacy hardware.

 

What all this means is that moving forward, you will absolutely need a much newer PC just to run Premiere Pro properly. And neither Adobe nor Intel nor your PC's OEM system builder will ever fix this compatibility issue at all.

L
Libertybelle2016
Participant
July 9, 2020

Thank you for the definitive statements. I called support and got the runaround and finger pointing to Intel. The Fix link in Premiere points to the wrong driver and was a waste of time.

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