Premiere Pro not using GPU acceleration - 2019 iMac with AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20

[anthoven]

Hi everyone,

Premiere Pro is not using my GPU for any tasks. I have a sequence with 32 layers of video, each with scaling, crop and Lumetri colour correction. I would expect these effects to make use of the GPU, but instead it is relying on the CPU.

The renderer is set to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal).

Machine is a 2019 iMac with Intel i7, 32GB RAM, Radeon Pro Vega 20.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Anthony.

[davidarbor]

What makes you think the GPU isn't being used? How's performance with 32 layers of video? 

And yes, scaling and the Lumetri effect are both processed on the GPU. Have you switched from GPU acceleration to "Sofware Only?" If you do and you see your performance tank then that shows your GPU was being utilized before.

Just because your GPU isn't seeing 100% usage doesn't mean it's not being used. Also, just because certain things are being processed on the GPU doesn't mean that the CPU doesn't still get used. Video decoding happens on the CPU, so it's a combination of the two pieces of hardware. You didn't say what kind of footage you're working with, but the public beta of Premiere just added GPU decoding of H.264 and HEVC (but only these two formats), so if you are working with that (although, working with 32 layers of H.264 sounds like an incredibly unpleasant thing) you could see how performance improves there.

[anthoven]

Hi David, thanks for your relpy.

I've assumed that the GPU isn't being used because it shows no activity in Activity Monitor.

Switching to Software Only rendering doesn't make a noticeable impact on the performance.

The footage I am working with is H.264, so might be worth giving the Beta a test.

Thanks!

[anthoven]

Hi again,

I have tried the public Beta of Premiere Pro to see if it utilises the GPU any differently, but there was no change in performance.

Interestingly, I can see it making use of the GPU with just two or three layers of H.264 video, but with the 32+ tracks, there was no GPU usage.