🔧 Premiere Pro Not Detecting CUDA with GTX 1660 — GPU Acceleration Greyed Out

[Mauricio Filho jornalista]

Hello, everyone.

I'm having an issue with Adobe Premiere Pro: the software does not detect my GPU and does not allow me to switch the Mercury Playback Engine to CUDA.

Despite having a fairly powerful machine, I'm experiencing performance issues even with basic video edits, likely due to the lack of GPU acceleration.

System Information:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-9700 @ 3.00GHz

• RAM: 64 GB

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660

• OS: Windows 11 Pro (Version 23H2 - Build 22631.5549)

• Premiere Pro: Latest version installed

Here’s what I’ve already tried:

• Reinstalled NVIDIA drivers (clean install)

• Updated Premiere Pro to the latest version

• Checked NVIDIA Control Panel settings

• Verified Premiere’s hardware acceleration settings

Still, CUDA remains grayed out and unavailable in the project settings.

Has anyone faced this issue or knows how to force Premiere to recognize CUDA with the GTX 1660? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Olá, amigos.

Estou enfrentando um problema com o Adobe Premiere Pro: o programa não reconhece a minha placa de vídeo e não ativa a opção de alternar o renderizador Mercury Playback Engine para CUDA.

Mesmo possuindo um computador razoavelmente potente, estou tendo dificuldades até para editar vídeos simples, devido à ausência de aceleração por GPU.

Informações do sistema:

• Processador: Intel Core i7-9700 @ 3.00GHz

• RAM: 64 GB

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660

• Sistema: Windows 11 Pro (Versão 23H2 - Compilação 22631.5549)

• Premiere Pro: Última versão disponível

Já tentei de tudo: reinstalei drivers da NVIDIA, atualizei o Premiere, verifiquei configurações no painel da NVIDIA e até mexi nas preferências do próprio software. Ainda assim, a opção CUDA permanece desativada.

Alguém da comunidade pode me orientar ou já passou por esse problema? Agradeço qualquer ajuda.

[nishu_kush]

That's not ideal.

Can you try the solution mentioned in the following community thread: https://adobe.ly/4lTqkJJ

Let us know if it helps. Moving the thread to the Premiere Pro Community.

Thanks,
Nishu

[Mauricio Filho jornalista]

Obrigado eu, pela a resposta

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

Grayed out means it's in use. They reversed the behavior from the previous option. Now, if Prremiere sees a usable GPU, you can only deselect at launch, by holding the Shift key down. That's why it's grayed out, as you cannot deselect within Premiere now.

That said, the 1660 is I believe about the oldest 'format' of the 1000 series cards, more akin in many ways to the 900 cards. Which are no longer usable at all.

So that 1660 is barely noticeable in use in Premiere at this time. Sadly. 

[Mauricio Filho jornalista]

Obrigado pela a resposta, muito obrigado mesmo.

[Ann Bens]

Software rendering update

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen At least look at the information if you don't understand hardware. 900 - Maxwell 1000 - Pascal 1600 - Turing.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1660.c3365

[R Neil Haugen]

Actually, I've had quite an education in Nvidia hardware on here thanks to the amazing depth of knowledge of @RjL190365  ... especially enough to learn of the convoluted way they combine parts as they make and release their different lines at times. I always defer to that users encylclopedic knowledge.

The biggest thing is it's a nine year old majorly outdated GPU at this point. Nearly dinosauric ... I started computers in my business with a 386 with a full meg of RAM  and a HUGE 40 meg hard drive, which I was mocked for because you will never need that much drive storage.

I don't know how many computers we've been through over the years, at times we had six stations for full computer setup for either business or image processing use. Typically both. I've built one from scratch for high-end use, and I've ordered from Puget to get one to work serious duty in both Premiere and Resolve (AfterEffects and other video apps too) and it's been an awesome machine.

But still, RJL has the depth I don't. Most can't compete with that user's data.

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen I often read posts about hardware, and often see how you write incorrect things, or just start a conversation "but I have Threadripper"... Turing video cards are still sold in retail, one of them is still a budget hit...

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen You once made fun of my post about the fact that there are no bloggers who test hardware for Adobe. And your post confirms that "encyclopedic" knowledge obtained from another user is not enough. You need to buy all the video cards, their various options, and test them manually for weeks, and not in Puget Systems benchmarks. Then you would know all the nuances and how hard it is. Hundreds of video cards have passed through me, I have been testing them since CS5... so I understand this issue a little. That is why I write that "evangelists" cannot cope, Puget Systems (with its strange builds) has already stopped testing in Premiere Pro. And Adobe engineers give out marketing figures, not real results.
It's just a disaster here... no time for specialists with their "encyclopedic" knowledge and their sarcasm.

[R Neil Haugen]

I am happy to bow to anyone's superior knowledge. Always. Although I do prefer to avoid implied or understood readings.

I think you might often misread my intent ... and that can be quite unfortunate. Perhaps you are ... creating intent? ... something maybe rather different than what I intend.

I've found that at times, people conflate a few words here and something there into some overall meaning that isn't at all included in the literal words. That does make communication rather difficult. So I tend to avoid discussions based on someone's "clear intent" personally. 

Because I don't claim to have a clue as to any other user's knowledge base nor intent. Nor do I have internal knowledge of the dev's intents past what has been posted here, or openly talked about in discussions such as NAB.

I can only respond to the words, using basically dictionary interpretation. I don't like sarcasm in posts unless it is clearly indicated, and mostly ... harmless. I don't like emotional diatribes either. As it is totally impossible to assess the user over a forum.

Frustrations, oh, I get that! The need to rant at times, oh yes. I've done it myself.

Personally, I want people to feel eager to post here, and to help each other. That's all, really. As in doing so, we can help each other get over nasty things to keep getting work out, and also at times get the devs attention to make some changes we might prefer.

Both seem quite worthwhile. And anything else seems not something I would personally spend time on.

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen 

You didn't understand what I'm talking about. I'm not writing about "higher knowledge", but about the fact that Adobe needs bloggers, tests, how to properly assemble and configure workstations, specifically for Pr/Ae.

Enthusiasts can't buy hundreds of components for decades to do this work for Adobe.

I've been running various publics (not in English) on Adobe Premiere Pro for over 20 years, and I see mistakes when choosing workstations, which then smoothly flow into "Premiere Pro has the wrong engine", "the math is wrong", "it's time to switch to DaVinci Resolve", etc.

Adobe's latest timid attempts: NVIDIA Quadro CX & AMD Radeon Pro SSG.

The software is getting simpler, the last one to remove/hide Mercury Playback Engine Software Only... (if you test hardware, you understand why it is needed) and this only makes the situation worse.

Or at least solve the problem with the HEVC codec at Puget Systems, assign one engineer only for hardware testing.

[R Neil Haugen]

From talking with the devs at NAB and MAX over the years  ... they have a lot of people working on the app, and they also routinely meet and discuss things with a wide, wide array of users. Including a lot of bloggers/YouTube/Network-streaming/Long-form folks.

One major blogger had like three successive post with YouTube coverage of how Adobe flew him to SanJose to go over things with him.

I know they have a massive segment that does user testing. Arranges for in-person meetings at NAB and also zoom type online sessions, and I've been through both. Typically a moderator and a dev or two. Fascinating experiences, as at times, in feeling like a mouse with someone looking down at you in a white lab coat ... lol.

Several hundred queries of things like "If you saw a UI element like this, what would you expect it to do?" And "What are the tools you find the most useful for your needs? What are the most frustrating? And for both, why?" Going on for an hour or more.

As they have people who apparently do that full time, I think they cover quite a few user groups in a very personal manner.

And the devs while at something like NAB are definitely looking for as many user responses to things as possible ... note stuff down righteously ... and will suggest coming back to meet with a staffer for deeper conversations. 

That the directions they go don't seem ... well, what any of us might individually prefer, is just that we're all so very, very different. In aisle discussions, no two editors ever do the same thing in the same way ... and that to me is fascinating. I had no idea there were so many ways to do everything "we" might want or need to do.

And I'm as puzzled by what they do at times as anyone. 

The public beta is used by quite a few users, so between I'd guess a thousand or more internal machines working on development, many thousand more are testing it before most anything is released. 

And my Puget build has been an awesome machine, now nearly five years old, and still blasting through Pr 2025 and R 20 like butter. Without crashing, issues with anything. Does Ae pretty sweet also. I am at the point of needing to upgrade that 2080Ti to a newer card. 24 full cores, 128GB of RAM, and twin internal Nvme drives, 8 other internal SSDs and a couple massive spinners, plus some external storage drives, a bit of BM kit ... it's been a solid and wonderful tool to work. I've got well over 25 things plugged in for USB and other external things, so moving is pretty frustratingly complicated. 

But it just works. I work with many pro colorists, and a goodly share of the PC users have a Puget build, and haven't heard a single complaint. Some use the high-end HP workstations, which tend to also be solid, if more spendy per bang than a Puget. And maybe not quite as optimized for specific video post apps.

As always, everyone's mileage always differs.

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen The last person from their team who did something was Todd Kopriva. One engineer had a blog on YouTube. Karl Soule can also be mentioned.
But there are no people like David Newman from Cineform, who answered a lot of questions on the forums about performance.
Where are the recommendations? You praise amd threadripper, it is a narrow-niche configuration, like all HEDT assemblies... That's the problem.

[R Neil Haugen]

Sorry, I don't think I can help you. Because it seems to me, that if "they" don't behave like you expect, and you don't see what you expect to see, you insist "it" can't possibly be happening.

And then you take simple declarative statements to make broad generalizations. To me, this seems to go to absurd levels. Where have I ever praised any CPU? I merely mention that for my use, the specific CPU works fine, and you inflate that to praising it!

I truly don't understand that conflation. If I did a lot of long-GOP work, like many do, I'd have an Intel CPU. But I don't.  So therefore the AMD chips were a possibility.

That is flipping all I intend to communicate. Period.

These are tools. Period. Fancy hammers. I don't ever care about the brand of the hammer, just that it works for what I need at the moment. Whether apps, hardware, cameras, whatever. I use both Premiere and Resolve, and teach pros to use both, for pay.

I prefer personally the ability in Premiere to customize my working spaces. Resolve has amazing color tools but the UI is to me backside ugly and I struggle (after a decade of use) to remember all the places they hide context menus on the various pages. A good friend thinks it has the most intuitive UI ever, why does anyone even need to look at the 4,000 page manual. (I ask why then do they need the 4,00 page manual ... lol)

We look at each other and laugh. Because everyone works and sees things differently, and wants and need different things from the tools at use.

Finally, I would suggest that you avoid reading in emotional responses to anyone's posts. It would make discussions simpler and more genteel, perhaps ... 

[Alex367466572b5i]

HEDT processors are useless (as well as X3D/eDRAM, although the numbers are pretty), their multi-channel is useless, the only plus is full Multi-GPU support, few people need it for Premiere Pro.
You just don't notice, but in serious topics where I want to hear something from Adobe, from their engineers, I always find your post, but on my amd threadripper...
Today there were posts on reddit one after another: lags, black screen, freezes, poor disk load, memory leak...
We don't need any new features, make a reliable tool for users, help them. If you can't hire people yourself... and the fact that they are there in labs behind closed doors, discussing something, this is of course very interesting...

Experienced users who moved communities are switching en masse to DaVinci Resolve... And those who do not want to do this and have worked 20+ years in this software will also be forced to leave. So hire professionals if you can't do anything yourself... and below is the topic, it doesn't work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/premiere/comments/1lm6fu7/feedback_addressed_in_premiere_pro_253_updates/

[R Neil Haugen]

Who are you replying to?

I'm a user, like everyone here who doesn't have the official Adobe badge by their name. And as Premiere has by far the largest base of any of the upper three editors, I don't think they're seriously worried at this time.

Understand, I use both. I don't give a fig about companies. The apps are only tools. Use the hammer that works for what you need and be happy.

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen Fresh article on Puget Systems and there is no Premiere Pro testing. As a result, we are left without articles... DaVinci Resolve test is there.
I have been writing about this for a long time, a complete failure of Adobe PR service.

[R Neil Haugen]

Their articles are quite often on how things fare with one type of hardware in one app, with a whole range of apps from Nuke through about everything. And with a new major version, like R20 just out of Beta, they will do an article on that.

As they did some time back with Premiere. Premiere hasn't had a major version change since late October.

[Alex367466572b5i]

@R Neil Haugen 
"Unfortunately, we had to skip testing Premiere Pro due to some updates from Adobe around handling H.265 media. That change prevents PugetBench for Premiere Pro from working with application versions that fully support the new NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. As such, we were unable to collect Premiere Pro results for this review. If you want more information on this, we have a blog post available explaining the situation in detail".

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi Mauricio Filho jornalista,

Sorry about the confusion. Currently, the option to switch Renderer is only available on systems with both CUDA and OpenCL capabilities. If you have a system with only NVIDIA-based GPUs, the CUDA-based Renderer will be used, and the option to switch it will be greyed out. So in this case, the playback engine is using CUDA, and the greyed-out state just indicates that there is no other renderer to switch to. Also, the option to switch to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only has been removed since v25.2. You can learn more about this here. Hope it helps.

If you are experiencing performance issues, it could be due to other factors that can be checked. Please let us know the type of media files you are working with (format, frame rate, & frame size) and the effects applied. It will help us get an idea about the complexity of the timeline.

Thanks,

Sumeet

[RjL190365]

You've got things a bit mixed up. As another poster stated, beginning with version 25.2 of Premiere Pro, you can no longer access software-only rendering within the Premiere Pro or Media Encoder settings. And if that GTX 1660 is the only GPU installed in your system, and you have not enabled the Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 that's on your i7-9700 CPU, then you're permanently locked to CUDA "accelerated" rendering, while with the integrated GPU enabled you can only choose CUDA or OpenCL for rendering (and OpenCL will utilize only the UHD Graphics 630 for rendering).

The only way that you can access software-only rendering at all would be to hold down the Shift key and then check the box marked "Use software only rendering" (this choice is one of the five choices in Premiere Pro's troubleshooting mode).