This article provides insight into Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) and Hardware Decoding/Encoding in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder. Show Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) rendererAdobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder can take advantage of available GPUs on your system to distribute the processing load between the CPU and the GPU to get better performance. Currently, most of the processing is done by CPU and GPU assists in processing certain tasks and features. The Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) renderer is used to render GPU accelerated effects and features. Here is in Adobe Premiere Pro. To identify the GPU accelerated effects, navigate to the Effects panel and look for the Accelerated Effects icon.  Apart from processing these effects, the Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) is used for image processing, resizes, color space conversions, recoloring and more. It is also used for timeline playback/scrubbing and full-screen playback using Mercury Transmit. Here is the list of . It is recommended to have GPUs with 4GB of VRAM but this may vary depending on the type of work you are doing in Adobe Premiere Pro. A general guideline to VRAM requirements:
For VR, 6GB of VRAM would be a good starting point. In case you are working with higher resolution stereoscopic frames (like 8K x 8K) you may need more VRAM. While using NVIDIA GPUs, ensure that you have the latest driver installed and it supports CUDA 9.2. An important aspect to keep in mind is that purchasing an older graphics card means driver support will end sooner than a newer card.
In Adobe Media Encoder you can also set the Renderer at the lower-right corner of the Queue panel. If the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration is not available as an option after updating or reinstalling Adobe Premiere Pro, then perform a clean installation of GPU drivers to solve the issue.
Adobe Premiere Pro uses a single GPU during playback and multiple GPUs for other tasks such as Render In to Out and for export. CrossFire can be set up to present multiple GPUs as a single logical GPU and for that case, Adobe Premiere Pro treats it as a single GPU. In case multi-GPU (non-SLI or non-CrossFire) configuration is used, it's recommended to disable system or driver-based automated GPU/graphics switching functionality. The Mercury Playback Engine running on the dedicated GPU isn't used to process everything related to the GPU. The integrated GPU can be used for specific tasks such as encoding/decoding certain codecs and User Interface (UI) activity which can show up while monitoring the GPU usage. GPU utilization depends on several factors. GPU usage while editing or rendering may or may not be maxed out depending on the number of GPU accelerated effects/features used and the GPU's computational capability. So, a powerful GPU like NVIDIA RTX 2080 may perform faster than NVIDIA GTX 1060 but it may show a lower usage because it is more powerful and may require lesser percentage of hardware resources to process the same information as compared to NVIDIA GTX 1060 or other mid-range GPUs. In case a few GPU accelerated effects are used, then the GPU usage may not be high and it might increase when more GPU accelerated effects are used. This only applies to VR effects. This message shows up when the GPU does not have sufficient VRAM to process the effect. Hardware-accelerated Decoding and EncodingPremiere Pro supports Hardware accelerated encoding to accelerate the encoding (export) performance and reduce the time to export H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) formats. Premiere Pro can also improve the timeline playback performance with Hardware accelerated decoding support for H.264 and H.265 formats. A GPU with hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding capabilities is required to use these features. Check from the information if your GPU supports Hardware accelerated Decoding and Encoding.
Apple silicon (M1 and higher) supports hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding of H.264 and H.265 formats, including 10-bit 4:2:2 decoding support. HEVC HLG 4:2:0 10-bit encoding still encodes via software. Here are the for Hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding. Hardware-accelerated Encoding supportSelect H.264/HEVC from the Format drop-down under Export Settings to activate this option. Then under the Video tab, go to Encoding Settings and set the Performance to Hardware Encoding. Supported codec platformsEncode: H.264/AVC (8-bit), HEVC 4:2:0 (8-bit and 10-bit) up to 4096x4096. With 10th-generation and later Intel® Core™ processors, HEVC encode support goes up to 8192x8192. HEVC 4:2:0 10-bit encoding is supported on Intel 9th , Intel 10th, Intel 11th and Intel 12th Generation Intel® Core™ processors. For more information, see the Intel documentation. Hardware-accelerated Decoding supportLike Hardware-accelerated Encoding, Adobe Premiere Pro also supports Hardware-accelerated Decoding to provide better playback performance while working with the H.264/AVC, HEVC media in the timeline. Steps to enable Hardware-accelerated Decoding:
Supported codec platformsThe feature works with MP4 media specifically H.264/AVC and HEVC codecs. Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder, and After Effects version 22.0 and later support HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit Hardware-accelerated Decoding on Intel platforms. The M2TS(MPEG-2 Transport Stream) is not supported. If using 4K M2TS media, transcoding it to a supported MP4 codec may help in getting better playback performance as the transcoded MP4 media can take advantage of Hardware-accelerated Decoding (Performance gain might not be substantial if transcoding HD M2TS media). The processing for Hardware-accelerated Decoding on an Integrated Intel® GPU on systems with 8GB or lesser RAM can be limited and might result in the CPU taking over the processing as the Integrated GPU uses the RAM as shared GPU memory. It's recommended to have 16GB of RAM or more for better performance. |
