Premiere 2022 not using my Radeon Pro 20 GPU on Macbook pro

[Black Rainbow UK]

Screen shot below - a 'render in to out' that should take 30 seconds takes 15 minutes. If you look at the activity monitor it's not using either of the GPUs. 

seems to be happening after updating to Monterey and Premiere 2022 -  what can I do to fix? Apple diagnostic doesn't bring up and faults and I have Metal Hardware acceleration turned on in project settings . Also takes ages to open Premiere and crashes if I cancel the render,

This is the absolute highest spec MacBook of 2018

[R Neil Haugen]

Do you have any GPU accelerated effects used? If so, Premiere will use the GPU while those effects are being processed. The GPU is not simply an addition to the CPU in any way shape or form. It is used for different types of processing when available as needed.

There is a completely different form of 'hardware/software' encoding, and that is for long-GOP formats: H.264/5 or HEVC. That hardware/software encoding (a comment found in the Export dialog summary when using long-GOP formats) is totally about the CPU ... and whether it has the specialized internal physical bits that can be used for long-GOP encodes.

If you have the Preferences option for hardware encodes for long-GOP encodes turned on, and your CPU has the bits, that will be used for one-pass encodes for long-GOP formats.

So ... no clue from your post whether you have any GPU accelerated effects, or whether you are rendering/exporting to a long-GOP format where that form of hardware/software is involved.

Neil

[Black Rainbow UK]

I'm 'rendering in to out' and have my preview set to ProRes 422 - that should be using GPU right?

[Christian.Z]

Beta OS does not always yield the best results. keep in mind that Adobe are also optimizing for upcoming OS releases

[Black Rainbow UK]

Sure but it shouldn't disable the GPU completely right? and 2022 isn't in Beta 

[R Neil Haugen]

It isn't that it is "disabling" the GPU. As noted above, if you don't have GPU Accelerated effects, nor say resizing, Pr won't use the GPU that much. The way they've tried to optimize the app is they 'save' the GPU for things it is really best at, and don't use it for basic encoding which the CPU is perhaps better at.

Neil

[Black Rainbow UK]

Do you use Premiere much in real world situations? Not trying to be a dick but when I used to render it maxes the GPU out - wether I'm using effects or not. Not using anything here aside from lumetri and some Neat video de-noising. A task like this would have maxed the GPU and taken the CPU to 120% and taken 30 secs - now it takes 10-20 mins or crashes. 

FYI same render takes about 5secs on the £699 base model M1 Mac mini 

[R Neil Haugen]

I've been working in Premiere daily since late 2013. And for the last few years, several times a week if not daily in Resolve also. My previous rig was an 8-core Intel with a 1060. Current rig is 24 core Ryzen with 128Gb of RAM and a 2080Ti. I've got an Acer laptop that's pretty "specced" too. They've all had different 'balances' of GPU/CPU use.

That laptop is the one I'm most frustrated with for CPU/GPU workloads. But ah well.

I've used and/or tested the crud out of everything from most r3d files, some Arri RAW, Fuji, Sony, Canon, and BM cameras. My main rig to shoot is a BMPCC4K. But that's backed with an "old" GH3 for additonal work and 'light' gimbal stuff. And I've contracted for additional work on a few shoots including Red Dragon and Sony A7S3 cameras.

I've spent time in-person with Adobe engineers at NAB and MAX talking about this and other things. Quite a few hours of it. So yea, I'm pretty comfortable with discussing the general way this app works.

From everything I've seen, and listening to the people with more knowledge discussing this, different hardware can, and probably will, have very different results. Some of the users with greater knowledge of the vagaries of the different chips and mobos and such have at times given detailed discussions on this. I'm not the expert in the specific case uses. But going from machine to machine, it will not be an exact replication

By design, the use of the program is designed around this divide: the encoded into Pr GPU  usage is primarily used for GPU accelerated effects, the CPU for everything else. That's the part the engineers do control. The reason being that they are working at trying to balance resource uses for the ways they see the greater share of their users working, including the hardware in use.

Separate from that, the hardware itself will have very different encoded design on the use of resources. Some mobos involve an on-board GPU chipset, and the CPU is set to use that as the 'primary' work assistant for graphics use, and uses any "discrete" GPU as an additional resource past the graphics chip.

Some CPUs will immediately cut all graphics/resizing to any discrete GPU and skip the onboard chip. There's a ton of variables there, that are partially (at the least) outside of the control of the application itself.

So the whys/wherefores on any one machine can practically be a doctoral dissertation. I can't give the full details on that, but I know ... it's "there". And totally confusing for most of us.

But back to the operation of Premiere itself: the GPU is not "just a partner" of the CPU or an additional resource. It's given specific, separate tasks by design. Whether one rig uses the GPU more or less 'in general' though, outside of the design of Pr, is outside the control of the Adobe engineers.

So our user experience will vary by CPU/mobo/RAM, GPU, drivers, onboard chipsets, all sorts of things. It's messy and frustrating at times.

Neil

[Black Rainbow UK]

thanks for taking the time to reply and apologies for me short one before.

In my experience (running a prodution company for a decade) GPU performance to render time is quite easy to compare. Double the GPU GB - double the render time. 

I've used this machine specicaly to render Arri ProRes, Canon RAW lite, CanonXF-AVC and probably everything else you can throw at it.  It's now running at minus 20x my 2013 macpro - it's just not using the Vega 20 or even the second garbage token GPU. 

It's not about specific codecs it's just not lighting up.

[R Neil Haugen]

That's a pain, no question. And note, I'm not saying the app is perfectly coded or properly designed ... just sayin' what is. And there have always been enough odd cases where it (or Resolve or whatever app) works much better on what is by general specs a very much lesser machine than X.

It's one of the reasons I went through Puget to get my newest rig. I've had a very hot & knowledgeable local builder make a machine that for the bucks was supposedly hot as Hades. But ... in some other apps it might have been, in the Adobe apps ... it was not that useful. (We had some unhappy discussions ... )

After he studied a lot more, he built my last rig, which I did get something close to four years on. And it worked pretty well in Premiere, not too bad in Ae, and ... ok ... with Resolve. But now, with HDR and high k-counts coming in, I wanted a bit more reliable build. So I worked with Puget for several months until finally pulling the handle. It's a good machine, does what it's supposed to in both Pr and Resolve.

I know Mac experts though that have been able to explain why X Mac that was older and less "specced", actually outperformed a newer Mac. Always listed as because of the specific nature of the bits & pieces each was made of, and how together that influenced overall performance. And the people that know that stuff off the top of their head amaze me.

I know a lot of Mac based colorists, and they spend a ton of communication time with each over over which models to get with what options for Resolve work. As some builds don't work nearly as well as others.

Premiere and Resolve are coded with very different concepts of what hardware resource use will help their clients. So getting a machine that works well with both is a bit of a hard thing. But this machine so far does well with both. And far better with Resolve than my last machine.

Neil

[Black Rainbow UK]

Thanks again for your long and thoughtful reply! You obviously know what you are talking about. 

My problem isn't that it's not quite performing up to scratch or optimising it's recources - it's just that it's just not using the GPU at all. it used to and now it doesn't.

I've tested it with Geek bench and i get the same compute score as I did 2 years ago so it's obviously working but premiere isn't using it https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/3909400

Is there any other weird setting or quirk here? Do i need new drivers? 

[Joost van der Hoeven]

You are using a Beta version of Monterey. De drivers are whatever Apple puts in those. And like others have said: If your are not using GPU accelerated effects, you GPU is not being taxed. Just exporting a sequences to ProRes will always just use the CPU. When you use scaling, lumetri and/of blur effects the GPU will kick in. With the new generation M1 processors there is a part of the M1 processor that will the ProRes workflows. So when you update your 3 year old laptop your might want to consider that.

[Black Rainbow UK]

Thanks for replying. 

All clips are individually colour balanced in Lumetri with a master adjustment layer LUT over the top

2 clips have Neat Video de noiser

All clips are scaled from 4k to 1080

4-5 clips have motion tweening

I'm pretty sure all of these factors should kick the GPU in even when rendering to ProRes. 

FYI I am using a ProRes 'Preview' workflow. So constantly rendering in-to-out as previews then exporting to h264 with 'Use Previews' selected. 

I've also tried straight exporting to h264 and it's the same both direct from Premiere and Media Encoder. 

I would buy an M1 Max today if there were in stock! I have a base model M1 Mac Mini that I bought as a backup which is insanely quick at rendering ProRes. Sadly the 8gb of Ram is very limiting. 

I Didn't realise Montery was in Beta - perhaps that's my problem. 

[Sean22461354m6b1]

Reading this thread is like reading the Adobe text books, makes no sense to the average person. 

[R Neil Haugen]

Hey, that's one of the things this forum is for. Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, Audition, Resolve, Avid, Nuke/whatever are complicated and complex apps. It takes a continual learning process to get better at understanding the underlying process and understanding how each app works.

So ask questions on the things you don't currently understand. There are a number of us here that would be happy to explain anything.

Neil

[Black Rainbow UK]

It's great! I haven't found my answer yet but I really appreciate the time you and others are taking to dive into this!

s

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Happy new year to you to @Sean22461354m6b1 

[Black Rainbow UK]

UPDATE: 

The same project has now started using the GPU when creating previews - very odd. 

[MARJOLEIN VAN DAMME]

@Black Rainbow UK - I feel your pain, same problem, No GPU to be found by premiere and performance went down in dramatic fashion, unworkable. I didn't update adobe premiere till last weekend because I had no choice otherwise I couldn't finish a project from someone else who started in premiere 2022. First the coloring was a off when I continued an old project I started in adobe premiere 2020 but ok, the color space "feature" was easily fixed and enoug documentation to find online. The GPU issue is hard to find anything. Now i read this and i inderstand it's fixed for unkown reasons? Anybody knows what to do? In the screenshot the GPU where i normally choose is not even between the options anymore. Please help, what to do

[R Neil Haugen]

If you're on a Mac, Apple has requested that OpenCL be "deprecated" by all vendors providing Mac software. So were you using OpenCL on a Mac ... ?

Neil

[MARJOLEIN VAN DAMME]

Hi Neil,

Thx for your response. The tech knowlegde is pretty thin here so I'm afraid I hardly know what your question means. But I believe that in the screenshot I attached the "missing option" said "open CL (deprecated)" or something in that line, which for me it meant I'm using GPU and your computer is awesome. So I guess my answer then is yes I was using open CL? So you say I have to deprecate open CL? Sorry for this vagueness, must be frustrating trying to help like that. Really apreciate the help 

[MARJOLEIN VAN DAMME]

And yes i'm on a mac

[R Neil Haugen]

Metal is now your only option, I think. Thanks to Apple ...

Neil

[MARJOLEIN VAN DAMME]

Wait, so my GPU is not available for premiere anymore??