Using outdated driver - What can possibly go wrong?

[Spawater]

Hi, 

Premiere Pro tells me my video driver, NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800, is an unsupported Video Driver.

It warns If you continue with known issues, you may experience performance degradation, instability and data loss"

I have continued with it anyway and so far so good. I've not rendered or published anything yet.

Can anyone please tell me what sort of problems I might incur?  Or should I just ignore the warning? Thanks.

[RjL190365]

I'm sorry to tell you this, but that FX 5800 is now completely obsolete. You see, Nvidia itself had ended all driver support for that CPU and all other Tesla-architecture GPUs way back in 2015! The last driver that was ever released for that FX 5800 was version 342.00, released on October 27, 2016. Accordingly, beginning with version 10 (CC 2015.3), Premiere Pro now no longer supports any Tesla-architecture GPUs at all for GPU acceleration.

And with each new successive major release of Premiere Pro, the program now requires much newer GPUs just to even run properly. In fact, the current 14.8 version of Premiere Pro now requires a GPU that has been released after 2014 (that is not based on a chip that was released prior to that year) in order to even be supported at all.

[Spawater]

Thanks for your reply. The odd thing is that my Premiere Pro seems tio work fins with this out-of-date driver. I'm wondering what is likely to go wrong?

[Ann Bens]

I think you answered your own question:

performance degradation, instability and data loss"

[Spawater]

Thanks for your reply. You may be right, but it seems tio work fine with this out-of-date driver. I'm wondering what is likely to go wrong?

[Peru Bob]

You may experience performance degradation, instability and data loss.

[Spawater]

Thanks. At the moment all seems to be fine, so I'm wondering what's the problem with my CPU?

[RjL190365]

In your case, then you are running with no GPU acceleration at all whatsoever. Adobe has not supported that GPU at all for Premiere Pro since the CC 2015.3 (10.0) version. Therefore, your system is now permanently locked to the MPE software-only mode for rendering.

And your system's CPU is slow because it is also old. At the time of the FX 5800's introduction, even the top-of-the-line workstation CPUs did not have more than four cores and eight threads to begin with (this was when the very first Intel i7 CPUs using the Nehalem/Bloomfield architecture were introduced).

And the FX 5800 itself is now more than 12 years old at this point. Adobe does not want to support anything that's more than about four to five years old, especially when it comes to GPUs.

By the way, there had been two completely different FX 5800 GPUs from Nvidia that made it to market. The Quadro FX 5800 is a completely different GPU from the GeForce FX 5800 (the latter predates the advent of CUDA GPGPU processing by several years). The Quadro FX 5800 is based on the second-gen revision of the Tesla architecture (a.k.a. Tesla Refresh for the GT2xx chips) that debuted with the GeForce 8000 series GPUs in 2006 (the Quadro FX 5800 itself uses the GT200 chip that debuted with the GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 GPUs in mid-2008). In fact, the Quadro FX 5800 is a GTX 280 with 4 GB of lower-clocked GDDR3 VRAM (the GTX 280 had only 1 GB of GDDR3 VRAM that ran at a much higher clock speed).

So, get over it. The FX 5800 (and the GTX 280 that it is based on) were good GPUs in their day. But in today's world, they're no longer competitive (performance-wise). Adding further insult to injury is that the cheapo GeForce GT 1030 (a sub-$100 GPU based on the much newer Pascal architecture) can just about keep up with these TOTL Tesla-architecture GPUs overall.

[Spawater]

Many thanks for your great explanation.

This leaves me a buit stuck, as I have just recently bought this computer on eBay. Should I buy the GeForce GT 1030 ? Or is there anything else I can do? Thanks again.

[RjL190365]

In your case, then what is the exact CPU that you have in that PC? If it's anything like a quad-core CPU with hyperthreading, then you may be able to go with a more powerful GPU such as a GeForce GTX 1650. And unless you're planning to upgrade to a newer and more powerful PC in the near future, do not go above a GTX 1650 SUPER as anything higher will be bottlenecked by your PC's old CPU.

[Spawater]

Hi, it is:

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz 2.93 GHz (2 processors). I am new to all this so it doesn't mean much to me.

[RjL190365]

Those CPUs are about as old as the GPU, in your case. You have a total of 8 cores and 16 threads, whose IPC is relatively low by current standards. In fact, the two CPUs put together are almost as weak as a single modern 4-core/8-thread CPU. Plus, the chipset does not support even PCI-e 3.0, let alone PCI-e 4.0 (or more specifically, the PCI-e bandwidth of those 12-year-old CPUs is limited to PCI-e 2.0).

As such, unless you really need more than 4 GB of VRAM, don't go with anything above a GTX 1650 SUPER for that PC.

[Spawater]

Thanks. I will lookk out for a  GTX 1650 SUPER and see how it goes.

[Spawater]

Thanks anyway. I can't buy another PC just yet. I will just carry on for now and maybe get a GTX 1650 SUPER as RjL suggests.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi SW,
Sorry about this. If it were me, I would resell the computer on eBay and get myself some decent hardware that is spec'd out to run Premiere Pro. Unfortunately, video editing is rather a serious endeavor when it comes to computers. If you don't have an adequate computer, your experience is seriously a bummer with today's highly compressed formats.

Thanks,
Kevin