Increasing VRam in Windows 10

[grendelfilms]

Let me first say that replacing my three video graphics cards would, of course, be the best solution. Having said that, replacing my three graphics cards involves a litany of very good reasons to avoid such a move, including getting under my desk and so deep into wiring that I might rather take a severe beating.

The problem, which is minor but annoying, is jerky movement of graphics during timeline playback in Adobe Premiere Pro 2019. I will say that this is during that playback only and the rendered video output is smooth as glass.

Several articles online offer some not so detailed, or tested, ways to artificially increase my VRam without the need to physically replace the cards in essence sharing my 32gigs of system RAM to do the catch up.

Has anyone encountered and solved this issue without card replacement, and would you share that solution? Or, should I stop whining and move on?  🙂

Thanks!

[Stan Jones]

I'd keep whining a little longer...

What cards? What driver version?

I don't know how to do what you ask, but I was curious about the "new" minimum requirement of 4GB VRAM and driver of 411.63 or higher. My card is a 760 with 2GB of VRAM, and I have 416.34 installed. And CUDA is automatically enabled. When I looked at resources recently during an export, the 2GB of VRAM was there plus a lot of shared memory.

So can anyone tell us whether shared memory (VRAM?) makes a difference?

[grendelfilms]

I am using older NVIDIA cards with the latest (according to NVIDIA) drivers, but one card has 2gb, the other two have just 1 gig. As I stated, I would love to find the proper procedure to increase shared RAM with the cards, but I am wondering if the three card system negates that possibility. Any help along that line is appreciated.

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi grendelfilms,

The playback in Premiere Pro may or may not be in real-time depending on the complexity of the timeline and the processing load on your CPU/GPU. The processing here is done by both CPU and GPU based on the effect that you have applied on the clips. Increasing the VRAM itself may not help much in getting better performance if you are mostly limited by the processing power of the CPU and GPU. Though if you are using 4K or higher resolution media, then higher VRAM GPUs can certainly help (6GB or higher depending on the type of media used).

Also, using RAM as VRAM may not help much in solving performance issues mostly because of the speed difference between these two. For example, the newer VRAMs are based on DDR6 memory and most of the RAM memory is based on DDR4 of lower memory types. This may cause a performance difference and assigning RAM as VRAM may not help.

Though you can try these steps to check if it helps in getting better playback:

• In Premiere Pro, choose File > Project Settings > General. Then set the Renderer as Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration.
• Decrease playback resolution if necessary. Click on the Wrench icon on the program monitor and then click on Playback Resolution and then set it to lower values like 1/2 or 1/4.
• If you are still not getting smooth or real-time playback then you may need to render the sequence to get a real-time playback. To do this, highlight your timeline, then click on Sequence > Render In to Out. This will pre-render the frames required for playback.

Hope this helps, let us know if you have any questions.

Regards

Sumeet Kumar Choubey

[grendelfilms]

Thanks Sumeet. I tried reducing the playback rez and that didn't seem to have any effect. Also, the Mercury engine playback function in the settings is dimmed and unavailable. I remember seeing something about this in a forum somewhere else, I believe, regarding the CC2019 rebuild and the Mercury engine. As the graphic cards are several years old and definitely under powered, I will likely replace them. My current system, which was self built in 2011 when I did a full HD upgrade to acquisition and editing, may need some tweaks as well, although I am not currently using any 4K in any project. System is an AMD FX-6100 Six Core processor with 32gigs of RAM, plenty of power for standard HD processing, I believe, although I really cannot say what the RAM details are.

[grendelfilms · Accepted solution]

SOLVED! After upgrading to 3ea 4GB graphics cards the Premiere Pro playback was still erratic. BUT, when I adjusted the Windows settings for performance, eliminating all effects except smoothing fonts, the playback is glass smooth, something that didn't happen with the old 1GB and 2GB cards.