Premiere 14.3.2 killed my hardware encoding

[jriker1]

Not sure what's going on, however I have a Quadro card in my server and have been taking advantage of the hardware encoding with Premiere 2020.  Usually shows like 20% utilization of the graphic hardware.  I just updated to 14.3.2 and now am lucky if I'm getting 3% utilization and it's taking a LOT longer to encode my 4k content then it did before.  Thoughts?

[Graeme Bull]

Which card? It's not uncommon for Adobe to move forward with methods that newer cards support and older ones don't. My guess is that the card you have isn't in the list for compatible cards. You have 2 options in such a case, downgrade Premiere and don't update, or get a new graphics card.

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

You may have an early K-series Quadro that is now no longer supported for CUDA processing in newer drivers. Although it has not yet been EOL'd by Nvidia itself, it began to become depreciated beginning with the 44x.xx drivers. The 45x.xx drivers introduced CUDA 11, which now no longer supports first-gen Kepler GPUs (based on the GK10x chips) at all. Support for the second-gen (GK110 and GK208) Kepler GPUs and the first-gen Maxwell (GM10x) GPUs remain in a depreciated state in the 45x.xx drivers. So, if you have an early K-series Quadro, and you are using the 45x.xx drivers, then you will be permanently stuck with software-only everything regardless of the version of Premiere Pro you're using.

Furthermore, Premiere Pro 14.3.2 now requires driver version 451.77 or later in order to work properly. So, the only way to continue with hardware acceleration would be to simply purchase a new GPU, especially since all Kepler and first-gen Maxwell GPUs (all remaining K-series Quadros will be affected by this support policy) will transition to legacy status (and maintained with security patches into mid-2021) upon the official release of the new Ampere architecture GPUs expected in a few weeks.

As it stands right now, your early K-series Quadro will run with the latest Quadro driver version 452.06, but both CUDA and NVENC/NVDEC will be disabled. If you take a look at both the Project settings and the H.264 or HEVC Export settings, you will find that the renderer will be locked to "Mercury Playback Engine Software Only," while the encoder will be locked to "Software Encoding."

In other words, everybody, including Adobe, had their rug pulled out from under them by the GPU manufacturer.

[jriker1]

I have a Quadro M4000 with driver 442.50.  Note mine are not showing Software Only.  They are showing Hardware Encoding CUDA.

[RjL190365]

Thank you for that. 14.3.1 and 14.3.2 now require driver version 451.77 or higher to work properly. And your GPU is a second-gen Maxwell GPU, which is now the oldest GPU generation that will continue to work fully with the 450-series drivers and CUDA 11.

[jriker1]

Thanks for the reply.  I updated my drivers, restarted.  Looks like it's still only hitting around 2.8% GPU usage and showing about 60 hours to convert 2 hours and 40 minutes of 4k video.  When this ever finishes will have to try one of my prior video files I did pre upgrade that I haven't purged the sources from yet and see if it's any different.

[RjL190365]

Which CPU are you using in that system? If older versions (up to and including 14.1) did significantly better than the most recent versions, then it just highlights the CPU-to-GPU balance. That M4000 is a weakling for hardware encoding compared to even Intel's QuickSync, especially since you are exporting in a format and color space that Maxwell does not support at all. So, although your Export settings indicate "Hardware encoding," Premiere's encoder automatically slammed the encoder into "Software encoding" mode with absolutely no warning whatsoever due to the limitations of the Maxwell GPU's NVENC compared to even a Kaby Lake QuickSync hardware encoder.

In short, you will need to upgrade to a newer GPU in order for hardware encoding to function properly with your video material and export settings, especially since you cannot force QuickSync hardware encoding at all with a discrete GPU installed in newer versions of Premiere Pro beginning with 14.2.

[jriker1]

Thanks for the fantastic info.  Upgrading is a costly proposal as my equipment, if I stick with the footprint, isn't cheap.  Have a pair of Dell Precision R5500 workstations in a rack.  Didn't come with this graphic card but installed one due to lower cost not to long ago.  Not even sure based on the input here if getting a better card would make a difference.  The CPU's are dual XEON X5680's also.

Is the thought at this point I need to drop down a revision or two to get my prior performance back?

[RjL190365]

In this case, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Those X5680's are now more than 10 years old. And tech companies do not like to support anything - either hardware- or software-wise - that's more than four years old. And any newer GPU upgrade will likely be bottlenecked for GPGPU processing by that platform's ancient PCI-E 2.0 interface for the primary x16 slot.

And that is not to mention that even dual X5680s are weaker combined than even a single 10th-Generation i5-10400 CPU, let alone a single AMD Threadripper 3960X.

And downgrading to an older version of Premiere Pro will not fix anything, in this case, because the latest update to the main Creative Cloud desktop app will force automatic disabling of all GPU acceleration in all older versions of Premiere Pro. In other words, older versions of Premiere Pro with older drivers will be permanently locked to the MPE software-only mode with software-only encoding as of the latest Creative Cloud desktop app update.

[jriker1]

Thanks.  Was thinking of going with a Dell 3930 as it is lower cost and can hold a full size GPU.  The 1U aspects of it may be noisy though.  Not sure if 1 CPU will be a problem also but sounds like a newer generation CPU will be better than my dual one I currently have.

[jriker1]

As a side note when I pull up task manager, before updating Premiere and Media Encoder for GPU I was seeing 

GPU0 - Copying

Now I see

GPU0 - Video Encoding

Not sure if there is anything to that.

[jriker1]

Guess I'm happy after spending all this time researching new systems that it was my system with the issue.  For some reason after upgrading Premiere, NeatVideo no longer was using the GPU at all.  It was disabled.  Enabled it and now things are back the way they were or faster.  Converting some 1080p stuff and it's fast.  Need to see how it is with 4k content.

Right now with 1080p content showing 22% CPU utilization, 38% memory, 3% disk, and 9 - 14% GPU utilization.