RX 580 8GB working really bad in Premiere Pro CC 2019

[themadquacker]

Hello!

So, i had the GTX 750 Ti 2GB and i upgraded to RX 580 8GB XFX. I tested in Premiere Pro CC 2019 my new GPU. But the playback is so much slow than before and i dont know why. After Effects is working well, but in Premiere is terrible.I already selected the "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)".

My specs:

RX 580 8GB XFX

Ryzen 5 1600

16GB RAM

Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!

[RjL190365]

The reason for such lousy performance with the RX 580 is that OpenCL is, frankly, effectively "depreciated" throughout the entire tech industry. You see, outside of experiments the official OpenCL specification (from the consortium that maintains OpenCL) has not been updated significantly since 2012. That meant that even the Radeon RX 5000-series Navi GPUs (the current generation) are bound by those ancient support rules (your RX 580 is now two full GPU generations old, being of the Polaris architecture which predated the Vega architecture that came in between Polaris and Navi). And Adobe's relative lack of performance and support for OpenCL shows. Slow performance and corrupted renders are two of the biggest problems. In other words, even with the most powerful GPU, OpenCL performance in Premiere Pro is lackluster at best.

Sadly, the only way to break this lackadaisical OpenCL support and performance throughout the software industry for AMD GPUs is for AMD itself to come up with a Windows-compatible proprietary API that's comparable to Nvidia's CUDA to replace OpenCL. AMD, unfortunately, is currently unwilling to do that, so it's stuck with OpenCL in Windows for the foreseeable future. The only other alternative that's available for AMD is to completely omit GPGPU processing support, which would permanently force Premiere Pro into the software-only rendering mode.

And since all Nvidia's lower-end GPUs at the same relative performance level up to and including Pascal are not worth their current street prices for the relative sideways-grade from your current GTX 750 Ti, the only fix would be a brand-new GeForce card of the Turing architecture. That means the GTX 1600 series. And with that first-generation 6-core/12-thread Ryzen that's currently in your system, I would recommend only two GPUs within that GTX 1600 series (depending on your budget): The GTX 1650 SUPER or the non-SUPER GTX 1660. (Nvidia does not offer a GPU that's in the RX 580's price range that has more than 6 GB of VRAM.) Anything else above it is quite overkill (including the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, the least expensive Nvidia GPU that's equipped or available with 8 GB of VRAM).

[themadquacker]

Oh, ok. I didn't know that. Thanks for the answer!

[RjL190365]

No problem. OpenCL support is spotty at best in Adobe's Premiere Pro anyway, as Adobe has several GPU rendering features that are not supported in Version 2.0 of the OpenCL standard, which came out in 2013. And all recent AMD Radeon GPUs are bound to version 2.0 of the OpenCL standard - that's much longer than Nvidia's most recent major update of CUDA, which dates from the end of 2018.

And now I know why Adobe had effectively disabled OpenCL support when an Nvidia GPU is the sole GPU installed in a given PC: The available GeForce Game Ready and Studio Drivers (and yes, even the 445.87 Game Ready and the 442.92 Studio drivers) officially support only OpenCL 1.2, which dated all the way back to the end of 2011. OpenCL 2.0 or higher support is required to enable OpenCL GPU acceleration - and even then, it is bound by the six-year-old rules. No wonder why OpenCL performance is so lackluster.

[themadquacker]

Again, thanks for the dedication to answer me. So, any suggestion to the next step? Bring the money back and buy a NVidia GPU?

[RjL190365]

It's the only feasible choice right now, unless you are willing to wait months or even years suffering through more of the same OpenCL 2.x wackiness. OpenCL 3.0 had been released within the past few weeks, but none of the currently available GPUs at all whatsoever support it at current graphics driver level. Even the most recent update to OpenCL 2.0, designated version 2.2, has its problems in Premiere Pro.

[albino_alien]

Hello, I am looking to buy a card, thats within my budget..I am wondering is this all because of AMD I'm building an i5-9400F with the MSI Radeon RX 580 8 GB or MSI Radeon RX 580 8 GB ARMOR OC Video Card will i have the ame problems ?

[RjL190365]

Yes. You will have the same problems. Plus, why did you choose an i5-9400F to begin with? You see, that CPU is actually weaker than even a three-year-old quad-core Intel i7 CPU, let alone one of the brand-new budget AMD Ryzen 3 3### series quad-core CPUs without the "G" designation. The lackluster performance out of the i5-9400F painfully reveals just how complacent Intel has been in the past decade or so, as Coffee Lake had been rushed to production in response to the success of AMD's Zen architecture, and Intel now has serious trouble keeping up with this new CPU development. Had AMD instead continued with yet another variant of the Bulldozer architecture, then Intel even today would have ended up with several more generations of mainstream CPU platforms with CPUs having no more than 4 cores, and thus the status quo would have continued.

And AMD is not the sole cause of the problems. It's OpenCL (specifically, OpenCL 2.0) itself that's also to blame. OpenCL support on the Adrenaline drivers right now is artificially restricted to version 2.0, which dates all the way back to 2013, at driver level. (Intel's integrated graphics that comes with its later 6th-Generation and newer CPUs support OpenCL 2.1 at driver level, but they reserve too little dedicated graphics RAM for Premiere Pro to function properly.) And Premiere Pro's OpenCL option is effectively disabled with Nvidia GPUs (only CUDA is available) not because of their historically poor OpenCL performance (as I had previously believed), but because all of Nvidia's recent drivers up to and including the latest 445.87 Game Ready driver version and the latest 442.92 Studio Driver version are artificially restricted to OpenCL 1.2 (which does not meet the minimum requirement of OpenCL 2.0).

AMD does make a good CPU platform in the Ryzen series, especially the Ryzen 3000-series without integrated GPU, plus the forthcoming new Ryzen 4000 APUs. Intel right now can't compete at this price point. And with the new 10th-Generation CPUs about to be shipped, the entire 9th-Generation Intel platform is now a bit outdated.

[Ritam5E4B]

Thank for your opinion but i have a system with ryzen 5 1600 nd nvdia gtx 1660 by inno 3d and i have 2 stick of 8gb ram  but my working is going slow after a little time of use . So thats why i was thinking of upgrade that (but kinda same budjet)   either the gpu with rx580 . Or with processor like 8 cores 16 threads . Ryzen 7 2400 

Or a higher clock speed like ryzen 5 3500 . So im literally confused .