Premiere Pro 25.2: Hardware encoding greyed out / unavailable

[Konstantinos33884151cos8]

Hi after updating to Premiere Pro 25 I cannot switch out of Software enconding, it is greyed out saying: "Hardware encoding is unavailable, please make sure this system meets hardware and minimum OS requirements for this funcionality" 

I am running a GeForce RTX 3070 with the latest Nvidia Studio Drivers (576.02)
with AMD Ryzen 9 5900x
64 RAM and

Windows 11 Pro

I have tried everything Reinstalling Premiere Pro, purging the driver with DDU, running Premiere Pro as admin, forcing CUDA through NVIDIA drivers, changing settings in Premiere Console with no success. And it's the same story in AME. 

Any other suggestions?

[Ann Bens]

Please post screenshot entire export settings.

Playback is decoding as in MPE rendering which is active. Cannot choose Software only in the newer version of Premiere.

[Fergus H]

@Konstantinos33884151cos8 You are seeing two separate things: 

1. In Premiere Pro v25.2, you can no longer choose software rendering. That is as designed. We made this change because our data showed that many customers had at some point switched to software rendering and because the setting is "sticky" (i.e., it applies to all new projects until it's changed again), were still accidentally using software rendering. Using software rendering dramatically lowers performance and can cause visual banding. We do have an article on this change that is about to be published; I will update this post when it is done. 

2. Software rendering is unrelated to software encoding and one should not affect the other. As Ann suggested, it would be useful to know your exact export settings. Also, are you seeing this on all projects that you attempt to export? Or just some? There are some file formats for which there is no hardware encode support. If you'd be willing, share your project and media with us and we can diagnose the issue. 

Regards,

Fergus

[Konstantinos33884151cos8]

Thank you for your time Fergus

1. I don't want to choose Software encoding, but there is no way for me to choose Hardware encoding either. 

2. The issue remains the same regardless of the project or my export settings: H.264, HEVC, FHD, 4K, main, baseline, high, high10 whatever parameter I try to use, Hardware encoding remains unavailable.  And I did not have the same issue previously. 

[Fergus H]

@Konstantinos33884151cos8 thanks for the info! Would you please try the following steps:

1. Launch Premiere Pro with the shift key held down
2. In the Reset options dialog, choose to reset app preferences and clear the media cache.
3. Once Premiere Pro is launch, create a new project
4. Go to the Import screen (from the top of the Premiere Pro window).
5. Click on the Sample Media option in the left side navigation bar. 
6. Import the first clip - "Sample Media Clip 1"
7. Create a new sequence using that clip
8. Go to the Export screen. 
9. Choose "Match Source - Adaptive High Bitrate"

After that's completed, would you please me if hardware acceleration is available? 

Thanks,

Fergus

[Konstantinos33884151cos8 · Accepted solution]

Hi Fergus 

Resetting Premiere Pro this way along with forcing the following settings from the console seem to have done the trick. Hw encoding is once again available. Thank you for your time and advice. 

Screenshot deleted by mod: Please do not use the internal developer tool to change the application.
It is against the corporate guidelines and is a request from Adobe Premiere Pro engineering.

[R Neil Haugen]

As Fergus correctly noted, 'we' would need to know what you are actually setting for the full export parameters, as some long-GOP settings cannot be 'hardware' accelerated, or require specific hardware bits to be so done.

Levels can also be an issue, as sometimes for some things in long-GOP you need to use a higher level, and some things seem to be not available at higher levels.

So ... it depends on ton of precise details.