So many issues "resolved" by using software only (not CUDA).... WHY?

[ajs21264098]

If it's a black screen: disable CUDA

if it's frozen playback: disable CUDA

if it's an error retrieving frame ###: disable CUDA

etc. etc. etc.: disable CUDA

CUDA offloads so much from the CPU and assists in renders. Its intent is amazing, but its implementation seems like a steaming dog pile of crap apparently. So why are there so many issues inside of Premiere with CUDA? So many tutorials claim the "solution" is disabling CUDA. THAT is not a solution to me. I don't want to disable CUDA. I want my render times to be 3 minutes, not 20. I want my timeline to be green, not red.

Am I missing something? Is this a "me" thing? Because I will GLADLY take the heat on this one if someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Or is this poor coding on the dev's part? I'm running an ASUS Strix GTX1070. Do I need something more powerful for CUDA to work better? I'm never running more than 50% at 45 C on the GPU

System specs

mobo: Gigabyte x570 elite

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x (running at 4.37ghz across all cores - stable) (water-cooled avg. 63 C)
RAM: 64gb DDR4 3200 (running at 3200)

GPU: GTX 1070

Boot drive: Samsung Evo 500gb SSD

Media drive: Samsung Evo 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD

Scratch drive: WD 120gb SSD

OS: Windows 10

Premiere: 14.3.2

What I'm editing: (4k DJI drone) (4k Cinema Raw Light) (4k 8bit mp4)

Sorry for the rant... I removed all the foul language, but my frustration is still evident. lol

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

Here is why:

The problem here is that you're using a CPU that's barely a year old with a GPU that's already four years old at this point. That's more than enough time for hardware problems to develop, such as failing GPU VRAM.

And although that is your primary problem, the secondary problem is that you're using a GPU that is seriously underpowered for your CPU. You see, although that GTX 1070 does well at 1080p resolution, it chokes very badly (as do all other older-generation Nvidia GPU architectures up to and including Pascal) at 4k.

And finally, all drone footage uses some variant of H.264 AVC encoding - even if the wrapper is MOV. That demands very heavy demand from the CPU. You will need to transcode or use proxies (not H.264 proxies) in order to work with this footage.

[R Neil Haugen]

RJL is really the reigning expert on the hardware right now, and I'm with him (?) on this. That's a significantly OC'd 12-core CPU with a way lower-powered GPU. It's not nearly a "balanced" system, which is the wiser goal.

And as he notes, you're running CPU-heavy media through that unbalanced machine. So, for much of the work, it's gonna be tasking your CPU far more than the GPU.

Now ... add in some GPU-centric effects like Lumetri, you'd maybe see the GPU go up. But that would depend largely on how well the rest of the system can parse the H.264 media.

Neil

[RjL190365]

Yes, as a matter of fact, you're lucky that you didn't go even lower on the GPU. A severely underpowered GPU like the GT 710 would have severely bottlenecked that 3900X. In fact, the 710 would have actually prevented the CPU from ever coming close to reaching 100% utilization even if the workload requires that to occur! That will cause major problems in general.

And the Pascal architecture dated back to the era in which the most powerful mainstream CPU had only 4 cores and 8 threads. In fact, Pascal came out around the same time as Intel's Kaby Lake (7th-Generation) architecture, whose mainstream CPU line topped out at only 4 cores and 8 threads. But mainstream CPU platforms have mushroomed in terms of computing power since that time - and today you'll see mainstream Intel CPUs with 10 cores and 20 threads, a close match to your 12-core/24-thread CPU that's now an excellent value right now for everything but sheer gaming performance.

So, right now you will still have a few months remaining to suffer through this mismatch in component generations because Nvidia has phased most of the current Turing GPUs out of production to make room for the successor Ampere architecture, which is due to be shipped in a few weeks. So even if Turing is far superior at 4k to Pascal, I wouldn't recommend paying full price for an outgoing GPU architecture right now.

[Andy 1968]

AJS
You are correct. There are many issues that get correct if  GPU/CUDA is dissabled as shown in the video below.

https://youtu.be/1mJnLnyACog

[Andy 1968]

garyp61741550

New Here ,

Aug 28, 2020

The file prior to import is 29.97, the sequence setting is 29.97, and the
export is saying it will be at 29.97, but the output file is actually 30fps
when re-imported back into premier.

I spent some time with Adobe support and they duplicated the issue when
taking over my laptop remotely and repeating my steps. They then disabled
hardware acceleration of the rendering/encoding process and that solved the
problem by staying on software only. Only issue is that my export times
have now gone up by 3x. I didn't have this issue before, it seems to have
happened after an update to the software. At least I have a workaround.

[Andy 1968]

The file prior to import is 29.97, the sequence setting is 29.97, and the
export is saying it will be at 29.97, but the output file is actually 30fps
when re-imported back into premier.

I spent some time with Adobe support and they duplicated the issue when
taking over my laptop remotely and repeating my steps. They then disabled
hardware acceleration of the rendering/encoding process and that solved the
problem by staying on software only. Only issue is that my export times
have now gone up by 3x. I didn't have this issue before, it seems to have
happened after an update to the software. At least I have a workaround.

[Christian.Z]

RJL explained it on point

[Andy 1968]

I have an RTX 2070 and an i9 9900K and have had several issues that were resolved by dissabling CUDA.

The Mercury Playback engine used to be less buggy.

[Phillip Harvey]

You are saying it was fixed by going to Software Encoding, not turning off CUDA rendering entirely, right? Or are you talking about turning the renderer to Software Only for the entire application?

[Andy 1968]

I already posted a link. You should check it out. That being said here is another one.

https://youtu.be/XQWXq7KpxBQ