Premiere 14.3.1/2 Not Responding is Radeon HD 6870 GPU an issue or what?

[dreDREb13]

Hey all,

I've been having issues with my Premiere in 14.3.1 and 14.3.2.  No matter what I try the program will eventually freeze and give me a "not responding" error.  Video playback will not work in source/record, either.  I have zero issues in 14.3, though, and everything runs smoothly.

Specifically in 14.3.1/2, the program seems to want to quit especially when dealing with drop down menus or switching between panels.  But, let the program run long enough and it'll eventually go to the "not responding" error regardless.  The program doesn't crash, just hangs indefinitely, pretty much.  Give it enough time and it'll even go back to running again until it just hangs again, eventually.  For what it's worth I'm also having the same issues with Media Encoder in anything 14.3.x.

I am on the latest Windows 10 Pro with AMD Ryzen 7 3700x CPU, 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and an old AMD Radeon HD 6870 GPU.  I would've assumed the old GPU is the hiccup, yet the program runs and exports and renders flawlessly in 14.3, so I wouldn't imagine the .1 update could've broken legacy that bad.  Not to mention that I've had zero trouble in AVID, as well.

And also to be clear: this is a brand new computer and I downloaded and updated to 14.3.1 (before 14.3.2 was out) right out the gate on a fresh install of Windows and the issues arose immediately, so a media cache wipe/preferences reset shouldn't eliminate the problem.

Kind of an issue for me, as I have an AE job coming up that requests I use 14.3.1 and I'm not sure if I will get this to work, and I don't want to buy and swap for a new GPU only to discover the hardware isn't the problem in this case.  I know 14.x is compatible up and down the board though.  Would I be able to use 14.3 while my other assists/editors are using 14.3.1 with no issue?

Thanks for the help.

[Moderator note: title added to for clarity of request.]

[dreDREb13]

No one has any idea?  Really would like to make sure for any future projects I'm on.

[RjL190365]

The compatibility issue for the HD 6870 will never be fixed at all - either by AMD or Adobe. You see, AMD had placed all Terascale-based GPUs into legacy support status way back in 2015 with the first release of Windows 10. At that time AMD released only a beta driver for those GPUs, up to and including the HD 6000 series. No new drivers had ever been released from AMD since then, while newer driver releases that are available via the Microsoft Update service are merely security-patched drivers that are based on that AMD beta driver from 2015.

As a result, you will need to upgrade your GPU to a newer card based on a newer GPU architecture in order to continue using newer versions of Premiere Pro.

In other words, your HD 6870, which dates all the way back to 2011, is now officially obsolete.

[dreDREb13]

Well, I figured it was obsolete, I just wasn't sure if its obsolescence is what's causing my issues with the 14.3.x versions or not, considering it runs and renders just fine on 14.3.

[RjL190365]

It's stepping up its major rewrite beginning with 14.3.1, in which the program will no longer run properly or at all if any piece of core hardware is more than four years old. You see, had Adobe continued to support such old or obsolete hardware, its software would either have failed to utilize newer hardware at all or become so severely bloated and unstable.

[dreDREb13]

Oh wow, I wouldn't expect such a major change to happen on minor revisions, but it is what it is I suppose.  I was planning on upgrading regardless, but maybe I'll expedite that timeline.  In the meantime, my 14.3 project should maintain compatibility with 14.3.x projects, correct?