No GPU OpenCL acceleration after upgrading to 2023

[Flavio_St]

I have an AMD Radeon RX 580 for which I reinstalled the drivers and restarted the system.

The only PPro that allows me to use Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration is 2022, in v2023 it is greyed out (see picture).

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

Adobe has silently changed the OpenCL version requirement for Premiere Pro 23. It now requires OpenCL 2.1 or higher support just to even use GPU acceleration at all. Unfortunately, all of the GCN GPUs including your RX 580 only support OpenCL 2.0 - too low to meet minimum requirement.

[Flavio_St]

Sad. I wonder why no one is talking about it. To my understanding, the latest AMD cards still use OpenCL 2.0

[RjL190365]

Hmmm...

If Adobe were to require OpenCL 3.0, then all AMD GPUs would have been permanently locked to software-only MPE since none of them currently support OpenCL 3.0. Only Nvidia and Intel currently support OpenCL 3.0.

[Ray Tice · Accepted solution]

Flavio S, please check out TechPowerUp's GPU database. AMD's latest cards, and even the RX580 (GCN 4.), support OpenCL 2.1.

[Ray Tice]

OpenCL version requirements have not changed for Premiere Pro 23.0. Other products may have other requirements. Thanks.

[Hubert267053796rob]

I have the same problem 😕

[Flavio_St]

Were you able to solve it? what card do you have?

[David Simonton, DVA · Accepted solution]

Your RX 580 should work fine with PrPro 2023, and should support OpenCL as a Renderer option.  I've assisted another customer with an RX 580 recently, who was having a similar issue.  Running the DDU utility (display driver uninstaller, publicly available tool) and a clean install of the Pro 22.Q3 AMD driver got his system working properly, so it's possible you're encountering a driver-related issue still.  Does your "AMD Software" (either Adrenalin or Pro version) launch okay and report that you're on the latest driver? 

[Flavio_St]

Update to everyone, this wasn't related to AMD or Nvidia. It was some driver issue that I couldn't resolve with Display Driver Uninstaller. I had to resinatll Windows and then it worked with my old AMD card.

[PDX NW]

I had the same issue with my AMD GPU. With the latest premiere update, 23.1, OpenCL is available again.

[RjL190365]

To clarify the OpenCL issue, it was not an OpenCL version requirement that was the cause. It was that Adobe programs were, and still are, picky about AMD driver versions yet Adobe does not indicate which ones are compatible or supported.

Besides, up to and including version 25.5, any version of OpenCL, including the first public release 1.0, were technically supported. But starting with version 25.6.x, OpenCL 2.0 support is now required. This eliminates all AMD GPUs older than about 2012 (and even some AMD GPUs manufactured up to and including 2016), as well as all Nvidia GPUs older than Maxwell. Combined with the complete elimination of the software-only rendering mode, systems using these GPUs will now be blocked from installing 25.6 or higher, resulting in 25.5 now becoming the end of the Premiere Pro road for these older GPUs.

And beginning with the forthcoming version 26, the "Pro" designation (having been re-assigned to the higher-tier Ai-laden version of the Creative Cloud "all apps" subscription suite) will be dropped from Premiere, resulting in Premiere for Desktop becoming the official successor to Premiere Pro.