Adobe Premiere Help: How to Enable CUDA Graphics Card

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I recently built myself a new computer a few months ago. I decided to treat myself with a brand new GeForce GTX 770 graphics card, which has worked wonderfully for all intents and purposes. Part of the reason I went with an NVidia graphics card was because I do video editing using Adobe Premiere. I had read that Adobe Premiere can utilize NVidia’s CUDA Cores to pre-render effects in Adobe Premiere, which cuts down on render times and makes the program run smoother overall.

Sadly, when I first installed Premiere, I booted it up expecting this enormous performance from my machine. This did not appear to be the case right out of the box. After searching around online, I found out that Premiere only has a handful of cards that have GPU acceleration enabled by default. In order to get other CUDA-enabled cards to work with Adobe Premiere’s GPU Acceleration feature, you have to go through a series of modifications. Bear in mind that just about any NVidia card that has 1 GB or more of RAM has CUDA cores in it nowadays. Whether you are getting a GeForce or a Quadro series card, you should be able to utilize CUDA cores to put extra performance into Premiere.

Adobe Premiere: Steps to Enable GPU Acceleration

But enough introduction, here’s how you enable GPU Acceleration for your CUDA graphics card in Premiere on Windows 7 64-bit.

1. Make sure Premiere is closed and open up a command prompt by going to start  type in cmd and press ENTER. This should open a command prompt window.

2. In the command prompt, type cd C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere CS5 and press ENTER. NOTE: If you have CS6 or a different version, you will need to modify the file path accordingly.

3. Now that you are looking at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere CS5 in command prompt, type GPUSniffer.exe and press ENTER. This will run the GPU Sniffer program, which will show you some detailed information about your graphics card, as seen here:

Adobe Premiere Step 1

4. Take note of where it says “CUDA device details” and more specifically, where it says “Name” and lists your card afterwards. You will need to go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere CS5 and open the file called cuda_supported_cards.txt. In this file, you will see a small list of graphics cards. You need to put a new entry in this document listing your graphics card as it shows up on the GPU Sniffer. So, for instance, mine would be GeForce GTX 770. You can see an example in this screenshot:

Adobe Premiere Step 2

5. Save the text document and open up Adobe Premiere. Create a new Project.

6. Go to the “Project” menu  Project Settings  General. Under “Video Rendering and Playback” click the dropdown box where it says “Renderer” and choose “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration”. This option only shows up if the cuda_support_cards document contains your graphics card. If you see this renderer option, then it means you have successfully setup Premiere to recognize your CUDA-enabled card.

Adobe Premiere Step 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Premiere should use GPU Acceleration as the default renderer in all your projects. But the easiest way you can make sure of this is to look at your Sequencer and see if there is a yellow bar near the timeline.

If that bar is yellow, then it means GPU Acceleration is working.

Adobe Premiere Step 4

Now you should notice effects processing quicker and smoother within Premiere. GPU Acceleration should allow Adobe Premiere to process effects in the background while you continue to work. This should alleviate the need to constantly render your sequence in order to maintain smooth playback.

I do hope this was helpful. Feel free to leave comments and feedback. Remember students, teachers, schools and non-profit organization can save on software, electronics and more with academic discounts at studica.com. Thank you!

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