Enable Additional Hardware Accelerated Decoding Support for H.264 and HEVC Footage

[Eccentric Locust]

I did some research recently due to a massive playback issue not too long ago with some HEVC footage I recorded with OBS Studio (for some context, the OBS footage was constant frame rate, not VFR).

Here is the link to that post for reference:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-bugs/hevc-8-bit-4-4-4-footage-is-very-hard-to-playback-i...

To sum it up, I realized that one of the main causes for my playback issues was with Adobe's lack of support for hardware accelerated decoding for a majority of the flavors of H.264 and HEVC codecs.

Here are a couple screenshots as well as links to the articles from Puget Systems back in December, 2022:

Premiere Pro: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-pr...

DaVinci Resolve: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-da...

For some context, here are a few specs from my PC setup:

CPU: Ryzen 9 7950x 16-Core, 32-Thread

GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090

RAM: 128GB of DDR5

My GPU is an RTX 4090 and even though it can decode video with NVDEC in all flavors of H.264 and HEVC codecs (including AV1, which Adobe currently doesn't support as of this post), it doesn't get used due to Adobe's lack of support for the footage I'm editing in (HEVC 8-bit 4:4:4 in MOV and MP4). And so that task is given to my CPU.

However I have an AMD CPU, a Ryzen 9 7950x, and unfortunately AMD doesn't put their Video Core Next hardware core in their CPUs; unlike Intel, which puts their Quick Sync Video hardware core in their CPUs. So really, the video decoding on my system becomes software only instead of hardware accelerated.

This makes the editing experience in Premiere Pro extremely difficult to manage with poor video playback in my timelines to the point where it's sometimes impossible to even work without transcoding to another codec.

For now, I've been transcoding to ProRes proxies to get around my issue.

Suggestion:

I highly recommend Adobe enable more hardware accelerated decoding support for the different flavors of H.264 and HEVC codecs.

While I understand that a lot of people are often editing 8-bit 4:2:0 footage with these codecs, having support for only this heavily overshadows editors and filmmakers that are recording in higher quality flavors of these codecs either because they want to or they simply can't afford to use ProRes due to high file sizes.

Other editing platforms, such as DaVinci Resolve, currently have more hardware accelerated decoding support than Premiere Pro (as seen from the chart above) and so I would really appreciate it for Adobe to really up their game on this.

I love Premiere and so I'd love to see smooth playback in my editing timelines for more types of footage!

[Fergus H]

@RjL190365 I was looking for a post on our forum and came across this thread. As mentioned in the link @mayjain provided, we are working on supporting H.264 and HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 in the NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture-powered GPUs. 

I did want to comment on something you said back in January:

"I am also expecting Nvidia to unlock 4:2:2 hardware decoding and encoding support (at least for HEVC) in its Turing and newer-gen GPUs beginning with driver branch 570"

If you're referring to 10-bit 4:2:2, that will only be available in Blackwell. It's a change in silicon that cannot be made available in older NVIDIA GPUs. 

Regards,

Fergus

[RjL190365]

Thanks for the clarification.

[mayjain]

Hi everyone,

We have released hardware acceleration support for 10-bit 4:2:2 media in both H.264 and HEVC codecs on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the beta builds.

Here’s the announcement: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-beta-discussions/now-in-beta-improved-support-for-nvidia...

If you have a Blackwell Architecture GPU, we’d love to hear your feedback from the Beta builds.

Thanks,
Mayjain

[RjL190365]

An update:

The official release version 25.3 is now available. Currently, only Blackwell-architecture Nvidia GPUs support hardware 10-bit 4:2:0 and 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 decoding, while hardware 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC decoding is a first for Nvidia (Intel and Apple GPUs already support hardware 10-bit 4:2:2 decoding for HEVC).