NVENC hardware acceleration and H264 - not supported anymore?

[fabioa81903688]

Hello everyone

I've been using Premiere Pro with my Nvidia GTX 2080 Super and i9-9900k, encoding with CUDA in H264 for almost a year now (I edit VR video for work)

now the new NVENC update promised groundbreaking support for hardware acceleration on Nvidia cards with 3x faster encoding.. great!

well.. thing is, trying to encode with my usual, unchanged OLD reliable settings, with the NEWEST Nvidia driver, there's no way I can encode because Premiere says "your system hardware does not support hardware acceleration" for the current export settings (WHAT? I've been using these exact same settings with this exact same hardware countless times in the last year)

so to use "hardware acceleration" I'm forced to choose H265 instead (which is not what I want because it's not as compatible) and it's also way slower than H264

although if I choose "software acceleration" and continue with my old settings, then in Media Encoder the renderer is Mercury hardware CUDA, but in task manager the process uses 100% of the CPU and only about 35% of the GPU.. (which seems pretty much exactly like before the new NVENC hardware acceleration update..

WTF? Any ideas?

I'm just adding now that I am NOT using VBR 2 pass, my settings are VBR 1 pass, so what was marked below as "correct answer" is not actually the solution

[hardyt4406985]

not available for VBR 2 Pass - Either CBR or VBR 1 Pass will work!

[R Neil Haugen]

As hardy noted, hardware acceleration is not usable with 2-pass encodes, and you didn't mention if you use that setting or not. So ... if you have been, drop that. And it isn't just Premiere or Adobe not doing 2-pass accelerated encodes ... no editing app I know of can do 2-pass accelerated encodes. 

I don't know of many editors still using 2-pass, so perhaps that's not your issue ... ?

Neil

[Ann Bens]

I have always used  2 pass. For the simple reason it analyzes first and then it encodes. 1 pass is on the fly.

[R Neil Haugen]

What exact benefit does that provide? I've tried both, and cannot tell a difference of any note.

Neil

[Ann Bens]

2 pass is know to give better quality image, but if you see no difference there is no point is using it.

[fabioa81903688]

not using VBR 2 Pass, I always used just VBR 1. so that's not the solution.. but thanks for the help

[hardyt4406985]

Can you post a screen shot of your export settings?

Also have you made sure you have Project Setting turned to CUDA? And Prefference > Media > Hardware Accelerated Encoding/ Decoding box Ticked?

Also have you checked if your GPU is supported? Thats all I can say really, perhaps a clean install? Hope you get it to work soon

[R Neil Haugen]

Still trying to puzzle this out ... but not being a staffer of course, my knowledge of the base program and internal noted issues is as limited as anyone else here.

Neil

[fabioa81903688]

Thanks Neil! I guess.. can anyone just check if they can encode H264 by selecting "hardware encoding in media export settings?

(I do have CUDA selected in the project settings, but I suppose that's another thing?)

[Ann Bens]

Which nvidia driver have you installed?

[fabioa81903688]

Latest driver, 446.14

[Ann Bens]

Try the studio driver.