Unsupported GPU for CS5

[cts51911]

With all the interest of the "unsupported" GPUs, I thought it was time to start a specific thread.

Please post your questions and experiences.

Hacking is not advised and the unsupported cards are not ready for production use.

You've been warned! 

[difrada]

I am having some difficulty following instructions.

1) I was able to find the GPU Sniffer Application; however, not able to find the GPUSniffer.exe file.  Please tell me where to find the .exe file.

2) Within Windows I was able to find the Command Prompt.  Pulls up a black screen with old DOS language.  How do I enter the (cmd.exe) for the GPUSniffer.exe file?

I have the GTX260 and would like to take advantage of the Mercury PE.

[Jeff Bellune]

From Windows Explorer, drag the GPUSniffer.exe file (which you've already found: it's the Application file named GPUSniffer) into the open Command Prompt window.  Press Enter.

-Jeff

[chupacabracobra]

difrada wrote:

I am having some difficulty following instructions.

1) I was able to find the GPU Sniffer Application; however, not able to find the GPUSniffer.exe file.  Please tell me where to find the .exe file.

2) Within Windows I was able to find the Command Prompt.  Pulls up a black screen with old DOS language.  How do I enter the (cmd.exe) for the GPUSniffer.exe file?

I have the GTX260 and would like to take advantage of the Mercury PE.

forget the gpusniffer

just go to the premiere pro directory (Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Premiere Pro CS5/) and find the text file of approved cards "cuda_supported_cards.txt" and type in "GeForce GTX  260" (EXACTLY like that including spaces and capitalization) then save it (security will probably block the save, so then save it to desktop and then drag it from desktop back into that drawer and hit yes at each windows secturity prompt) and then it run PP again and the option to select the mercury hardware engine will be enabled.

[difrada]

thanks

Doug

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

[klsteven-vBdprK]

I read that the GPU is not used for decoding. Does anyone know what the reason for this is?

[difrada]

The GTX 260 is NOT one of the certified graphics cards for the Mercury Playback Engine in CS5. It is one of the graphic cards mentioned in a work around.

Doug

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

[Harm_Millaard]

It could be two reasons, but I don't know which one applies:

1. It was not feasible from a programming point of view.

2. The potential gains would be completely negated by the overhead of switching from CPU to GPU, from RAM to graphics memory and back and returning to CPU.

[chupacabracobra]

Harm Millaard wrote:

It could be two reasons, but I don't know which one applies:

1. It was not feasible from a programming point of view.

2. The potential gains would be completely negated by the overhead of switching from CPU to GPU, from RAM to graphics memory and back and returning to CPU.

If it was not workable, maybe it would've been more due to context switching between CUDA and

the h.264 decoder (I think Fermi has made context switching much

faster though than on the old chips) or perhaps only 1 or 2 streams are supported by the h.264 decoder and they didn't want to bother mixing and matching some streams with assist and some not (although it seems they already do that with CUDA???) or maybe when haivng to deal with edited video it's hard to make it out well for various reasons as composed to a single, constant already processed stream?? Although perhaps they could've just used CUDA to do it and forgotten about the h.264 decoder, the GPU often seem to be pretty underutilized, although it depends.  Maybe they didn't have time to work it all out if if it did end up being a very tricky and complex balancing act and since using the CPU speeds up all types of video and not just h.264, maybe they just started there. Maybe something to make CS6 a nice upgrade? Who knows. It's really hard to say without knowing a lot more of the details, the reasons could range from silly to extremely good.

[difrada]

Tried to add GTX 260 to the list of graphic cards I found CUDA outdated 2020. What does that mean? How does one make the CUDA current?

Doug

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

[Dave_Knarr]

You need to download the latest driver, that's all

[balizumba]

I came  across a very detailed site

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm#Note_4

about graphics cards also tutoring how to "copy-paste hack" the txt
file. They mentioned that before you perform the  "copy-paste hack".
That i should upgrade my nvida driver. I get confusing information
when I try to find the correct driver for my system off the NVIDIA
website:

So i check the nvidia site and from chrome browser do a "maunal
search" to find the correct driver for my GeForce 310m. It directs me
to the driver:
VERDE NOTEBOOK RELEASE 265
Version:266.58 WHQL
Release Date:2011.01.18
Operating System: Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 64-bit
Language:English (U.S.)
File Size:166 MB

However when i check the supported cards, my GeForce 310m is listed!!
SO does this mean that this driver will not work for my card? wtf?

Okay. So i click on the "automatic driver download" link off nvidia's
site using firefox instead of "manual search" ("automatic driver
download" is not possible with Chrome browser). and i have the option
1-of the SAME Verda driver  OR
2- Intel(R) HD Graphics GeForce/ION
Driver v266.58
Version: 266.58  WHQL
Release Date: January 18, 2011
(this may be a dumb question but are the intel and nvidia both
supporting GeForce? are they two different kinds of cards/drivers with
GeForce in common?)

Which driver do i run? are there multiple versions of the nvidia driver 266.58  WHQL for different chipsets?

I'm terribly afraid that if i load the wrong one my screen with go black again.

HELP

Z

[difrada]

I really am sorry. I cannot answer your questions because I do not know the

answers. I had a problem with my card not meeting Adobe requirements. I asked

the question in the forum and I got lots of answers. I pursued the answer where

the individual said there was a hack that would answer my questions. I

attempted to follow his directions. They didn't work. He asked me to call him;

I did. It was during the telephone conversation that he talked me through it

and found a work around to the glitch in his instructions.

Doug

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

[balizumba]

can you give me this guy's phone number? where does he live? USA?

I'm desperate here.

[Jim_Simon]

Use this one.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-266.58-whql-driver.html

[balizumba]

My worst nigthmare has come true

I installed the driver the Joe Simon suggested. Everything seemed to install right (i clicked on clean install. maybe a bad decision because it's screwed me now) Then upon reboot my screen just froze up no black screen, just froze when loading up desktop. The same thing that happend last time. THe thing that i was most afraid of happening again.

Even worse situation now is that even in safemode, I cannot roll back the driver like i did last time (maybe because i clicked CLEAN INSTALL??)

what can i do? I'm pissed. this bloody nvidia/cuda/adobe thing is very confusing: which cards are supported gpu, "hack", which cards are supported for which driver.... I'm not a computer wiz and I"m trying my best to get this stuff working. Arrrrggg! I feel like ripping my hair out!!

S.O.S!

Z

[chupacabracobra]

function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}

balizumba wrote:

My worst nigthmare has come true

I installed the driver the Joe Simon suggested. Everything seemed to install right (i clicked on clean install. maybe a bad decision because it's screwed me now) Then upon reboot my screen just froze up no black screen, just froze when loading up desktop. The same thing that happend last time. THe thing that i was most afraid of happening again.

Even worse situation now is that even in safemode, I cannot roll back the driver like i did last time (maybe because i clicked CLEAN INSTALL??)

what can i do? I'm pissed. this bloody nvidia/cuda/adobe thing is very confusing: which cards are supported gpu, "hack", which cards are supported for which driver.... I'm not a computer wiz and I"m trying my best to get this stuff working. Arrrrggg! I feel like ripping my hair out!!

S.O.S!

Z

Whatever issue you are having has nothing to do with Premiere Pro, the hack or CUDA.

I would go to the nvidia forums on the support section of ww.nvidia.com and maybe check some hardware forums too.

Something seems to be going wrong with your laptop and the video drivers. Maybe others have the same issue with that version and your chipset.

But again, the black screen on boot has zero to do with anything regarding Adobe or even CUDA.

search around anadtech, hardforums, nvidia forums, etc.

maybe check with the laptop maker, maybe they bugged something up

in the meantime you can try to find an earlier driver vesion and see if that boots without going black screen

[mylifevisual]

Great to see all the testing with the "unsupported" cards and the hack!  Love it, althoguh I already have a GTX 285.  Thought I'd post some experiences I've had with my system and GTX 285.  Would be great to see some system specs apart from the various video cards being tested so we know where we could improve apart from the video cards.

My system:

GTX 285

8GB DDR3 1600

Core i7 920 (perfectly stable and cool at 3.8Ghz)

Two (2) Raptors in Raid 0 for OS

Three (3) Raptors in Raid 0 for Working-Project Disk

Video:  Canon 7D, AVCHD Full 1080 24p

MPE definitely improves playback and render, but will not run seemlessly through a timeline with longer non-GPU accelerated effects such as Additive Dissolves or Non-Additive Dissolves. Adding a second layer over an Additive Dissolve and I'm back to CS4 poor performance.  I've tried Full resolution playback, 1/2 and 1/4 and it just won't do it.

Does anyone have this same experience with the unsupported hack or supported cards?

I hope Adobe is looking to add/replace the non-GPU accelerated effects with GPU/MPE accelerated ones during CS5 updates.  They picked some common effects, but so what - expand these!  Adobe is saying "we have this great program, but it will only benefit you sometimes - oh, and if we make all of our effects GPU accelerated we will put all of our third party effects people like Boris out of business, so we'll wait for them to create some instead"

[Chuck_A__McIntyre]

We should be getting our two supported 285 GTX cards either today or tomorrow.  Just for the fun of it, I applied the hack to one of our systems that's going to get a supported card.  Right now it has a GeForce 9500 GT.  Everything works without errors etc. with this hack applied.  No render line and a yellow render line in some cases with 3 layers of video with MPE supported effects applied.  One problem though, and it's a big one, I don't see any playback benefit and exports take twice as long with MPE enabled.  So... It MAY be that Adobe has focused upon supporting cards based upon their actual benefit to the editing workflow (speed) as opposed to stability/errors etc.

* I haven't seen smoke yet, so I don't think this minor hack can do any hardware or even software damage.  I don't spend much time behind Command Prompt windows, but you can save some time if you decide to try this hack out by dragging and dropping the GPUSniffer.exe into the Command Prompt window and hitting Enter.  The whole thing only takes a couple of minutes.

[cts51911]

Chuck A. McIntyre wrote:

So... It MAY be that Adobe has focused upon supporting cards based upon their actual benefit to the editing workflow (speed) as opposed to stability/errors etc.

I think some cards just don't have the muscle to be of any benefit.  If you look up the 9500GT you are using, it is very cut down in terms of specs (cores, bus width).

[balizumba]

does this hack still work? for my nvidia geforce 310m? I'm asking because mine is also a non supported card AND these posts are a bit dated

I just bought a brand new ASUS a42jc laptop. i5.4gb RAM. Geforce nvidia 310m 1gb CUDA.

I wanted to update my drivers to get the acclerated cuda rendering in Premiere CS5. THEN I checked the Nvidia site and they say my 310m card is not supported! wtf!? because the sticker on the laptop with nvidia logo says "geforce 310m CUDA 1GB". so wouldn't that mean i could use the drivers?

I tried to use the drivers. they installed fine. then when i rebooted laptop my screen froze to black screen! i had to roll back the drivers to get computer working again.

much help needed...i've been trying to figure this CUDA thing out for the past month!

If i try the hack, how bad could it mess up my computer? will all the graphics be screwed? or just when i run premiere? I"m not a computer wiz, so i wouldn't know how to reverse the effects if the hack didn't work.

THanks

Z

[difrada]

Z,

It works great for me. I ended up calling the man who created this work around

and he talked me through it. I doubt I could do it with out his help. How bad

can it mess up your computer? I have no idea since it didn't mess up mine.

Doug

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

[chupacabracobra]

balizumba wrote:

does this hack still work? for my nvidia geforce 310m? I'm asking because mine is also a non supported card AND these posts are a bit dated

I just bought a brand new ASUS a42jc laptop. i5.4gb RAM. Geforce nvidia 310m 1gb CUDA.

I wanted to update my drivers to get the acclerated cuda rendering in Premiere CS5. THEN I checked the Nvidia site and they say my 310m card is not supported! wtf!? because the sticker on the laptop with nvidia logo says "geforce 310m CUDA 1GB". so wouldn't that mean i could use the drivers?

I tried to use the drivers. they installed fine. then when i rebooted laptop my screen froze to black screen! i had to roll back the drivers to get computer working again.

much help needed...i've been trying to figure this CUDA thing out for the past month!

If i try the hack, how bad could it mess up my computer? will all the graphics be screwed? or just when i run premiere? I"m not a computer wiz, so i wouldn't know how to reverse the effects if the hack didn't work.

THanks

Z

people really need to calm down about this 'hack'. It's not even really a hack! ALL you do is type a name of a graphics card into a text file! That is all! There is no way it can mess up your graphics forever, or never been undone, etc. etc. It doesn't change the slightest, tiniest thing about how your system software or hardware work. All it does is lets this one particular program not turn off the GPU code.

The premiere pro code currently checks to see if you card is listed in the text file (and passes tests for graphics card memory capcity and CUDA driver level), the 'hack' simply means you type in the name of your card so it is in the text file! Nothing more.

It's about the least hacky hack in the history of hacks and one could almost argue it doesn't even deserve to be called a hack.

So long as your card supports a recent enough CUDA and has enough memory there is no reason in the world it should not work (so long as nvidia hasn't bugged the particular drivers that you are using). It won't melt you machine, erase your hard drive, steal your bank account. It is possible that if your card has really weak low-end power that the benefit might not be much and perhaps the way they optimized the CUDA code won't be ideal for your card, there is even a very slight chance it could make things slower overall (although considering how much work the CPU has to do to decode formats and all the rest still I really tend to doubt that even a slow card would end up bottlenecking anything although you never know at least not if you are handing heavy h.264 files or the like).

as for the black screen and the drivers, hard to say, but it's nothing to do with CUDA and premiere pro, the 26x nvidia driver branch has seemed kinda buggy to me, go to nvidia forums and try to find out what is going on with the drivers you tried.

[metalsaber]

I'm hoping Adobe expands their lineup of acclerated effects.   As you said, they got quite a bit of them and a lot of the popular ones.

I'm just running a i7 920 proc oc'd to 3.2GHz with 12GB of 1333 RAM.  2 - 500GB and 2 - 1TB hard drives not in RAID.  I put the machine together for photo editing/video games before I even considered using it for video editing, so I'm stuck with the way it is.  I have too many 3rd party programs on it that I don't want to go through the grief of re-activating.

Next machine I build will be in RAID from the beginning.

[armonics]

i bought GTX260 and tested HACK method... installing new driver , editing txt file and Nvidia setup

but even though i selected MPE with GPU accelation, there is no CHANGE...

playback also laggging , rendering, exporting. all no change...

GPU-z shows GPU load 0% when I render...

what shall I do?

my GTX260 core clock 576MHz , RAM 896M clock 2000MHz

[cts51911]

Remember that your CPU still needs to decode the video.  It has been said many times here that CPU/GPU work hand in hand.

What is your CPU, Ram, HD setup, ?

Also, what format video files?

If you are seeing ZERO benefit, you may want to reinstall.

Does the renderline turn yellow to red when you switch from SOFTWARE ONLY to GPU mode?

It has been working for others so....