How effective is using 2 graphics cards?

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I've had a fairly old NV Quadro4000, and need more power as Premiere is performing very poor with Neat Video. I've not got much funds, so ordered a used NVidia QuardroK4000 with a little more power, but hoping that the doubling of the devices is going to be of some effect.

Any advice for how to make double cards work effectively? I'm imagining dedicating one of them to Premiere and the other to Neat Video...?

[Moderator note: moved to best forum.]

[Guest]

No, it won't work well at all. 

Sell them and get single GTX 1060

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Okay, I'll take your word for it, they're not too expensive. There's so many cards out there and I don't really understand the specifications beyond the number of CUDA cores and amount of ram. What's so different about the GTX over the Quadro models?

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I found one on eBay for $73 from China (long wait for UK delivery). Would it not be effective to leave Windows in the hands of my old Quadro and designate Premiere only to the GTX 1060?
Sorry to keep questioning you, but I have no experience with this kind of hardware and I'm going by guesswork & theory here.

[Guest]

Theoretically it would be great to have one for compute and one for graphics, in reality, that works terribly. 

This benchmark website is super helpful, but my main priority is CUDA version supported, and VRAM space: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-Quadro-K4000-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1060-6GB/m7730vs3639

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Most info I'm getting from Google and a friend who is a PC pro, tells me that GeForce cards are just for smooth gaming playback and Quadro are editing/rendering cards. I've ended up ordering both a GTX-1060 and a QuadroK4000, I'll just see what works best.

My specific issue is that when I render in Premiere or via AME queue with the Neat Video plugin, the performance is disgracefull. Neat Video 3.5 is GPU accellerated and it's activated in the settings, but the GPU graph zig-zags every couple of seconds between 0-50% while Premiere mumbles around with 20% CPU usage.
A 3 minute video still had over 6hours on the AME waiting clock by the time I'd got out of the shower! As soon as removed Neat Video and exported again, it rendered in 6 MIN not 6 HOURS with the GPU at almost constant full throttle. Seems to me that Prem/AME won't share the gas with 3rd party plugins.

[Guest]

The only difference between Quadro cards and GTX is that Quadro supports ECC memory for high realiability applications. GTX used to not support 10 bit video, but that's not the case anymore. 

I highly suspect that your issue with Neat video is VRAM thrashing. The only way to fix that is to find a single card with a whole bunch of RAM. If you NEED 16GB of VRAM, the only way to get it is to buy a Quadro, as 11GB is the largest VRAM size in the consumer lineup. 
If you've got money to burn, get a current generation RTX 2060 Super or 2070 that has 8GB of VRAM. I picked one up on Cyber Monday for only $390

Oh, and Quadro supports Mosaic, which doesn't matter here, along with some other weird special features targetted at advanced research like quad-buffered stereo and disabling the USB-C ports. 

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I've got ECC RAM, 32GB of it - it's a 2nd hand server PC

[Guest]

That's why it works so well when you remove the GPU. You've got pleny of RAM for Neat to use when it's doing the OpenCL operations on the CPU. When it's doing the OpenCL operations on the GPU, all of that has to be in VRAM. 

[Guest]

And just because you have ECC RAM, doesn't mean that you must use ECC VRAM. For this application, there is no need for ECC RAM in the first place. You can restart the comptuer and keep working, it's not like you're running mission critical graphics machines. 

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Disabled GPU in Neat, specified CPU only for that plugin and rendered 10 second FHD clip in AME with hardware rendering selected. TWELVE minutes to render 10 seconds.

Remember I told neat not to touch the GPU, but Adobe's rendering is averaging just 5% of GPU, 11% of CPU, and 7GB of DDR3 RAM

Disabled Neat entirely, the same 10 seconds rendered before I even got a screenshot. On longer renders with no interference from Neat, I've seen Adobe do this;

I used Neat in Vegas for years with worse cameras and never had to come crying to the community. I don't trust Adobe, I reckon it's designed to fail 3rd party plugins

[Guest]

Maybe you should use a version of Neat Video that is actually supported...

3.5 was comptable with Premiere Pro CC 2014

It's 2019, upgrade to version 5

https://www.neatvideo.com/features/version-history/nv4pr?os-tab=win

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I found my problem - release of the GPU from Neat did not take effect until a re-start of Premiere, it's flowing again now. Rendered a Neat filtered 60 secs in about 3 minutes, with the GPU running >90% and CPU at around %70 again.
From what was happening before the fix it's clear that Premiere needs the GPU more than Neat does, but they wouldn't share.

[EDIT]

Nope, I take that back - I had deactivated the plugin, that's why it worked properly.

Thanks for your efforts JPooley_H. I will demo an update, if that doesn't work correct I'm dropping Premiere. I only took it on because Vegas16 didn't have proper nesting but Vegas 17's added that this year.

[Guest]

I highly suspect that GPU switching has improved in the later versions, you're welcome! 

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Got a demo of Neat 5, got the same grief and reported a bug to Neat support to see what wisdom they could offer;

> Used within Premiere Pro CC 2018 (on a nested sequence), despite leaving
> the plugin as using CPU only, it prevents PP from using GPU acceleration when
> rendering either timeline previews or final render through Media Encoder queue.
> With Neat disabled, PP rendered my test 60sec in 3 minutes and I watched
> both the GPU and CPU hit >90%.
> With Neat given 8 CPU cores to play with (deemed as optimised) I tried to
> render the same clip but it prevented Premiere from using the GPU; it hardly
> reached 5% and the CPU sat around 10% in task manager.
> 5 minutes later I could see in the preview that the clip timeline hadn't
> passed more than a few seconds and predicted render time kept getting longer.
>
> Disabled Neat and hit render = Full Power to Adobe again. It just seems to
> stop Premiere from using the GPU/CPU properly

I believe (based on our developers' experience with Adobe documentation, support, etc.) 

that it is a feature/limitation of Premiere itself. Premiere does not use its GPU processing

when certain types of plug-ins / video effects (including Neat Video) are used. 

We are not sure why Premiere does that but it is a decision of Premiere and its developers

and so can only be changed by them.

To efficiently use Neat Video with Premiere I recommend to enable use of GPU by Neat Video

in Neat Video Preferences. This should speed up processing because at least Neat Video's part 

of processing will be done faster.

[Guest]

Good testing. This looks to be a bug on Neat Video's part. I can use Red Giant denoiser with OpenCL just fine while also getting GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro. 

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Works fine in Vegas using neat V2.4

Usually about 4x the render time but it sure as hell didn't take 12min to render 10sec clip, and the CPU/GPU fans were on fire, not 10%

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I tried Red Giant Denoiser III and it gave me the same grief. Just have to wait for my new graphics card, and hopefully it will all work better under Windows 10. (I've got Win7 & 10 on a dived drive but under Win10, PP says no to my current graphics card.)

[Guest]

Oh you're doing this on Windows 7? Yeah that might be why the GPUs are getting grabbed. I'll be interested to hear if that's the solution. 

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Me too. I've got to wait until Feb to get the compatible GTX1060 from China, so I did some more searching around eBay for Adobe recommended cards and bid on an RTX 2060 6GB being sold here in UK. Trouble is I've now found out they both want an 8-Pin PSU, and my system's only got a 6-Pin

[Guest]

You can get adapters on Amazon for $5

I would have recommend that you pick one up on Cyber Monday, but it's a bit late. I scored a RTX 2070 for $389 and now they can be had for about $100 more

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A friend of mine who's a long-time PC maintainance man and gamer has recommended against 6-8pin adapaters. He reckons the 6 pin source simply won't carry the power required for modern GPU cards.
See the reviews at the bottom of this page.
Massive frustration is I can't upgrade my PC's main PSU because it's a poprietery HP gadget with only 18 motherboard pins. Everything else on the market is 20.

[Guest]

It depends solely on the wattage of the PSU. Those adapters are great in a pinch, but they can also allow people who haven't done the math to try to pull too much. We use them in our HP Z840s without issue. Those HP power supplies are way overpriced.