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Carlos Eduardo5D91
Carlos Eduardo5D91
Participant
October 21, 2021
Question

Premiere Pro and After Effects does not work with AMD VEGA II

  • October 21, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 3286 views

Could anyone help me on how to make Premiere or After Effects use AMD Radeon VII GPU (16gb)? Because the programs identify the hardware, they are correctly configured to be used, but opening the GPU usage graph is zero%. In Final Cut the use is perfect. I'm on an iMac Pro with Inten Xeon 14 core, 64gb of ram, Big Sur.

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3 replies

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 22, 2021

On the Mac side, it's not about the specific graphics card but whether or not the Mac supports Metal - which yours does.

 

At least with the current versions of Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, you're not going to see the same amounts of GPU usage at the same times.

 

My 2017 iMac Pro has the Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB.  Assuming I've applied enough GPU accelerated Effects to cause the Render Status Bar to turn red in the Premiere Pro Timeline, I'll see the GPU usage go up in Activity Monitor only while rendering and it's usually not more than 5.0.  If the Render Status Bar isn't colored at all (like ProRes clips in a Sequence set to ProRes Video Previews) or if it's Yellow, the GPU usually will pretty much stay very, very low (0.0 to 0.2) while editing.  Over in Final Cut Pro, the GPU kicks in while editing and while rendering, sometimes going as high as 30.0 during a render, but usually between 2.5 and 15.0 while editing.  Of course, that's based on what I'm asking Premiere Pro and FCP to do at a given time.

 

Even though the GPU usage isn't high on the Premiere Pro side, you should be able to observe the performace difference on your iMac Pro by doing a render action (any of the options under Sequence > Render) to a section of the Timeline that's flagged as Red by the Render Stauts Bar with Mercury enabled then again with it set to Software only.  Rendering 10 seconds of scaling a 1280x720p MP4 clip to 3840x2160 with GPU accellerated Effects like Lumetri, Noize and Basic Text applied will take about 2 minutes with Mercury enable (with about 5.0 GPU usage) and almost 3 minutes with Software only (with no GPU usage) on my iMac Pro.

 

If you're not already using ProRes for Smart Rendring in Premiere Pro, that should provide a very good performace boost on any Mac, especially the iMac Pro that you have.  On the After Effects side, I have found that the new Multi-frame Rendering feature nearly cuts render time in half on my iMac Pro both while working in the Comp as well as when rendering movie files.  Tha'ts currently in the public beta and should be available in the next update.

 

Your 16GB of display RAM should really shine when using something like Adobe Dimension or Adobe Substance Stager, but as you've noticed, not so much in Premiere Pro.

    Carlos Eduardo5D91
    Carlos Eduardo5D91Author
    Participant
    October 29, 2021

    Unfortunately, Adobe's research into this problem of misusing the GPU is recurrent on several forums. Unfortunately I will have to move to Davinci or Final Cut as there is no effective solution from Adobe. A neglect does not give due attention to this problem, just justifying that the error is possibly the user's.

    R Neil Haugen
    R Neil Haugen
    Legend
    April 26, 2022

    Same situation there i have an I7-4770K CPU with 4 core at 3.5ghz with Intel HD 4600 integrated this with my core GPU an AMD RADEON VII 16GB (A Fast GPU enought for 8K live processing) , but seems the politics of Adobe want to support only NVIDIA and also they don't want to have the benefice of a fast Premiere Pro (faster than the concurence) and in parallel touch and get new connunity member, for contribution !!! Why ?

     

    Tip:  AMD use"Vulkan" a similar dev interface than "CUDA" so where is really your (Adobe) reality statetments ?)

     

    I should break my purchase of the full Adobe packages, and search another Windows compatibles solution or build my own one 😉 

     

    For my first time in this "Video Editing World"  i am a bit surprised that you don't want to Grow !

     

    Are you like NVIDIA in partner ship with Apple that on this video editing product you give a functional and commercial preferences to those, therefore some difficulty with Apple product like MAC PRO with dual RADEON VII......... ever more , but is not here the subject !

     

    I hoppe i stay kind and respectful with my reply to the Adobe Support Community rules, this are only idea to move forward your products in this electronics shortage time.


    These apps are all just tools. Fancy hammers, use what works.

     

    I work both in PR & Resolve. I really dislike the Resolve UI, the lack of customization, and the way they lock down my Elements panel to half or less because they want me to spend several thousand to buy a BlackMagic control panel.

     

    Which only, of course, works with Resolve. Right. Well, their profit model is get you on their software cheap to sell you hardware. Different strokes ....

     

    That said, I've many friends who LOVE LOVE LOVE working in Resolve, editing through color & finishing. And yea, they've got a TON of money in BlackMagic hardware. But that's great ... it suits their wants and needs and they love it. Awesome!

     

    A bit of history ... until Apple couldn't get Nvidia to give them all the house secrets in order to "more properly utilize the GPU into their system" ... when Apple was clearly working on GPU design themselves! ... all Macs were Nvidia.

     

    Most post video people work on Macs. Therefore ...

     

    So in general practice, Nvidia was the GPU designed/optimized and used for video production.

     

    AMD cards were notably designed/optimized and used for video gaming.

     

    And those are two very separate tasks, not at all the same in function or use of the GPU.

     

    Since Apple went to AMD, the development of AMD cards and their utilization in Macs for video post work of course jumped. But there were initial issues with different cards, like the infamous double-D700's that would overheat and die.

     

    But it's only in the last two years that AMD cards have really been pushed into video post processing workflows. And Apple has of course worked at integrating them into their machines. Mostly it works, but many of the earlier cards worked far better with OpenCL than Metal. But Apple gave a very firm decree: all vendors writing software must switch to Metal only. Even if the card didn't use it well.

     

    That wasn't Adobe's call. It's always an interesting relationship with Apple.

     

    Neil

    Everyone's mileage always varies ...
      R Neil Haugen
      R Neil Haugen
      Legend
      October 21, 2021

      What is your Mercury Acceleration set to in the project settings dialog?

       

      Neil

      Everyone's mileage always varies ...
        Joost van der Hoeven
        Community Expert
        Joost van der HoevenCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        October 21, 2021

        What Neil says. What is your Renderer set to. Also what footage and effects are you using?

        R Neil Haugen
        R Neil Haugen
        Legend
        October 21, 2021

         Each app is coded differently for how and when they use what resources. So the GPU may not be working at one point, and pinged at another.

         

        In PrPro, GPU use is determined by the effects in action at any one moment. Color corrections/Warp and resizing will get GPU use, many other things won't. They have a list of the GPU accelerated effects.

         

        Neil

        Everyone's mileage always varies ...
        Carlos Eduardo5D91
        Carlos Eduardo5D91Author
        Participant
        October 21, 2021

        My works are very diverse in terms of the use of effects, transitions, plugins, color corrections, and at no time is the GPU triggered in Premiere Pro or After Effects. And on similar projects, the final cut fully utilizes the GPU. It's something that's not right between Adobe software and hardware.

        John T Smith
        Community Expert
        John T SmithCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        October 21, 2021

        Over on the Windows side, I would say check the driver version ATI Driver https://www.amd.com/en/support to be sure it is fully compatible

         

        I don't know how driver updates are handled on a Mac

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