I'm at my wit's end - Dell says unsupported card causing issues

[unknownsailor]

A month or so ago I posted up my problems with my Dell XPS 15 4K 9560 ( i7-7700HQ, 32GB RAM, SSD,  GTX 1050) and Premiere Pro. Basically it was grinding to a halt and becoming unusable. Some kind people tried to help me through the problems but it was never resolved. I have since gone back to Dell and they have just come back telling me that Premiere Pro does not support the 1050 and that I should have bought a Precision laptop instead. This after a two-hour chat with their sales team before I bought the machine telling them exactly what I would be using the laptop for.

I have run the exact same project using the same files on the same hard drive on my old ThinkPad W540. It has no dedicated hard drive, no SSD and only 16GB ram, and yet I can run the project without an issue. What's more, creating proxy files for my project makes no difference to the performance on the Dell. It still grinds to a halt. NVidia drivers are up to date.

How can a more up-to-date machine with a dedicated graphics card perform worse than an older machine? Why is the 1050 not supported by PP and is this really going to be the reason why I am experiencing terrible performance? I simply don't understand the logic of this.

Any pointers?

[Jeff Bugbee]

A GTX 1050 should be fine for your machine. Let's ignore your specs for the moment because it seems like those are fine.

What do you mean by "comes to a grinding halt?"

What version of CC are you using?

[unknownsailor]

Hi Jeff,

I'm using the latest version 2017.1.2 (22 build) v11.0 Oasis. I have the latest driver installed for the graphics card and pointed the Nvidia 3D settings to use the Nvidia processor for Pr.

By grinding to a halt what I mean is individual panels within Pr take a few seconds to load and are drawn top-down, like they're being manually pasted onto the screen like a piece of paper, if that makes sense. When I scroll the timeline cursor over a clip it take a few seconds to appear in the Program window. If I play a sequence and then press 'stop' sometimes it takes a few seconds to respond, sometimes it just locks up and continues to play the clip, the top bar tells me Pr is 'not responding' and then hangs like that for up to 20 seconds. If I play a sequence it will play the first few clips, provided I have not altered them in any way, and then it continues to play the audio but the Program window preview freezes.

I was advised to use an earlier version of Pr but I'm editing GH5 10bit v-log 1080 (30fps) clips so I need the latest version but I don't think this is the issue. I can edit the same clips on my old ThinkPad without these symptoms if I run proxies. I've run proxies on the Dell and it makes no difference.

[chrisw44157881]

that definitely sounds exactly like GDI graphics raster displaying, not Opengl. You need to manually update graphics drivers. Then verify that cuda is enabled in premiere's preferences render.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Still having trouble with this one unknownsailor? Let us know if you still need assistance.

Thanks,
Kevin

[unknownsailor]

Hi guys, thanks for the replies.

Yes, still having issues. CUDA is set for rendering (i tried without but it was worse) and all the drivers are up to date.

I had a minor success by decreasing the screen resolution from 4K to 1080. This has helped improve things a little, but still not great. The timeline still locks up. I can't play more than two clips at 1/4 quality without it freezing still.

After not hearing from Dell they finally got in touch and I am beginning the process of returning the laptop for a refund. The problem is I bought it in the UK and am now in the South China Sea, but that's my problem. I just hope they honour a refund.

This is the second Dell I've owned and it's my second bad experience with them. Will be looking at alternatives this Christmas so may start badgering the forum in a couple of months for advice.

Thanks, all, for the help.