Your System’s Hardware Does Not Support Hardware Acceleration for the Current Settings

[SK321]

I'm a little confused as to why I get this message only when I'm trying to do H.264 VBR 2-pass exporting. H.264 1-pass VBR and CBR both allow me to use Hardware Acceleration. 

System Specs:

Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

Ryzen 5950X

64GB DDR4 RAM

GeForce RTX3080

Samsung 2TB m.2 SSD (OS)

Samsung 4TB m.2 SSD (Project Drive)

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

I am sorry to tell you this, but that is a restriction imposed by the GPU makers themselves. Absolutely nobody (GPU-manufacturer-wise) supports 2-pass hardware encoding at all whatsoever.

And if you worked in another video editing software that allowed you to select hardware encoding in 2-pass, the GPU will not be used at all (in this case, there will be no warning or indication whatsoever). So kudos to Adobe for notifying the user of this restriction.

[SK321]

I am sorry to tell you this, but that is a restriction imposed by the GPU makers themselves. Absolutely nobody (GPU-manufacturer-wise) supports 2-pass hardware encoding at all whatsoever.

And if you worked in another video editing software that allowed you to select hardware encoding in 2-pass, the GPU will not be used at all (in this case, there will be no warning or indication whatsoever). So kudos to Adobe for notifying the user of this restriction.

By @RjL190365

Maybe I don't fully understand how 2-pass VBR encoding works and you can correct me, but I thought the first pass was basically examining the footage and having the computer get a better understanding of what bitrate to use during different parts of the video to better compress the video without any quality loss, and the second pass was the actual encoding. So, it makes sense to me that the first pass wouldn't utilize the GPU, since the examination of the footage seems like a job more suited for the CPU, but why can't the GPU be used during the actual rendering pass? Or am I just totally wrong in my understand on how 2-pass works?

[RjL190365]

It's the way all NLE software works, regrettably. Once software encoding is forced upon, every single NLE's encoder will become locked to software-only encoding for the entire duration of the export (as in hardware encoding or rendering cannot be auto-enabled in the middle of an exporting job no matter what).