Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) renderer FAQ

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) renderer.

Adobe 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, the CPU does most of the processing, and GPU assists in processing certain tasks and features.

What is a GPU-accelerated renderer used for?

The Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) renderer renders GPU-accelerated effects and features.
Here is the list of GPU-accelerated effects in 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, resizing, color space conversions, recoloring, and more. It is also used for timeline playback, scrubbing, and full-screen playback using Mercury Transmit.

What are the system requirements for GPU Accelerated renderer to work?

It's 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. Learn more about recommended graphics cards for Adobe Premiere Pro in Windows and macOS.

A general guideline to VRAM requirements:

• 1080p - 4GB VRAM
• 4K – 6GB VRAM 
• 6K or higher – 8GB or higher VRAM

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. 

How to enable the Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) renderer?

• For Premiere Pro, go to File > Project Settings > General > Video Rendering and Playback, and set the Renderer to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL/CUDA/Metal).
  

Go to Preferences > General for Media Encoder and set the Renderer to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL/CUDA/Metal) under the Video Rendering section.

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 after updating or reinstalling Adobe Premiere Pro, perform a clean installation of GPU drivers to solve the issue.

• Clean Installation of NVIDIA drivers.
• Clean Installation of AMD® drivers.

Does Adobe Premiere Pro utilize a multi-GPU setup (SLI/CrossFire) to process GPU-accelerated effects and features?

Premiere Pro uses a single GPU during playback and multiple GPUs for tasks such as Render In Out and exporting. CrossFire can be set up to present multiple GPUs as a single logical GPU; in that case, 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.

Why do I see activity on the integrated Intel® GPU and not the dedicated GPU?

The Mercury Playback Engine running on the dedicated GPU isn't used to processing 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.

Why is my GPU utilization low?

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's more powerful and may require a lesser percentage of hardware resources to process the same information as compared to NVIDIA GTX 1060 or other mid-range GPUs. If 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.

Why am I seeing "This effect requires GPU Acceleration to work while applying VR effects "?

This only applies to VR effects. This message shows up when the GPU does not have sufficient VRAM to process the effect.