Supported graphics cards for GPU of Mercury Playback Engine acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Supported graphics cards for GPU of Mercury Playback Engine acceleration in
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 (as of June 2012):
NVIDIA CUDA for Windows:
• Tesla™ C2075 (when paired with a Quadro cards as part
of an NVIDIA Maximus™ configured system)
• Quadro 6000, 5000, 4000, 2000, 2000D, 5010M*,
5000M, 4000M, 3000M, 2000M, FX5800, FX 4800,
FX 3800, FX 3800M, FX 3700M, and CX
• GTX 580, GTX 570, GTX 470, and GTX 285
• NVIDIA CUDA for Mac OSX:
• Quadro 4000 and FX 4800
• GeForce GTX 285


OpenCL for Mac OSX 10.7.x:
• ATI Radeon HD 6770M and HD 6750M in MacBook
Pro computers; minimum of 1 GB VRAM required
(*M designates mobile solution for laptops and all-inone
computers)
For maximum performance, make sure any add-in
video card is installed in a 16x PCI slot inside the host
computer.



Again, check the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 technical specs web page on Adobe.com (tinyurl.com/AdobePWP-04)
for updates; software updates may add support for new hardware.
This—together with the speed of your storage devices (discussed below)—has a direct impact
on the number and size of streams of video that may be played back in real time. It also affects
rendering time of your final output. For example, NVIDIA performed a test using a timeline
consisting of six layers of video with Tint effects, 3-way color correction, Gaussian blurs, the Ultra
keyer, text layers, and layer blend effects. This was rendered for H.264 BluRay output with MRQ
(Maximum Render Quality) enabled. The times required for this job were (times are stated as
minutes:seconds):
Render Times for Example Timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6:
8:16 CPU only (8-core 3.2 GHz Xeon W5580 PC)
1:44 NVIDIA Quadro 2000
1:11 NVIDIA Quadro 4000
0:56 NVIDIA two-card Maximum system* (Quadro 2000 + Tesla C2075)
(*In the case of a two-card Maximus system, Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 uses the Tesla card
component for CUDA acceleration, and the Quadro card component for display and other
OpenGL tasks such as color space conversions and display scaling. After Effects CS6 can
use both cards for CUDA and OptiX processing; more on that later in this document.)
As a natural consequence of the above, Adobe Premiere Pro is as sensitive to the amount of GPU
memory available as normal CPU memory. Whether the CUDA hardware acceleration portion
of the Mercury Playback Engine can process a frame depends on the size of the frame compared to
the amount of GPU memory. To be processed with CUDA hardware acceleration, a frame requires
(width x height) ÷ 16,384 megabytes. If that value exceeds the available memory, Adobe Premiere
Pro will use the CPU for rendering of that current segment. This becomes a consideration for larger
digital cinema formats: For example, a 5120x2700 pixel “5k” frame from a RED camera requires
843MB of free GPU memory. This is on the edge of what can be supported by a card with 1GB of
total GPU memory (as some memory needs to be reserved for other display functions), but would
work comfortably on a card with 1.5 or 2GB of GPU memory. Bottom line: If you plan to be working
with large image sizes, get a GPU with more than 1GB of VRAM.
Adobe Premiere Pro is highly dependent on the speed of your storage media. You will enjoy
better performance and fewer dropped frames if you use multiple drives to spread the work load.
At a minimum, you should consider a two-drive system, with one drive containing your operating
system, software, and media cache, while the other is used for your source files, previews, and
final exported renders. Preferred is a four-drive system, with one dedicated to the operating system
and software, the second for source media and project files, the third for the media cache, and the
fourth for previews and exports.