How to make Premiere CS5 work with GTX 295 and possibly all 200 GPUs

[Ozan Biron]

Originally Posted by David Knarr

Hi Ozan,

You asked about the new NVIDIA drivers 257.21 WHQL.

I had been running the 197.45 WHQL drivers on 8 different systems. Premiere CS5 worked perfectly on all the computers.

I installed the 257.21 WHQL drivers on all 8 systems, then the problems began. Two of the systems are crashing on bootup, BSOD. A third system is having problems with Premiere CS5 with the 257.21 WHQL driver. It randomly crashes while using Premiere CS5. The other 5 computers are running fine.

All computers are running Windows 7 64 bit and have 6 gigs of memory. I am running several different models of video cards from NVIDIA in the computers. I went so far as to swap cards around and reinstalled the 257.21 driver several times and the systems that are having problems, still have the problems.

I have restored all the systems back to the 197.45 WHQL driver and ALL systems are back to running perfectly.

Dave
Studio 1 Productions

i ended up downlaoding 197.45 but didnt install it yet. I was curious to see wa happens with 257.21.

Im running it now with 257.21 driver and prem cs5....

What am i suppose to be seeing wrong? Everthing seems to work ok i guess soo far. What are the problems that people are running into with the latest driver?

I have 5 layers of video, all CC'd and other effects with a yellow bar. My cpu usage is hovering around 14% - 36% ish durin play bck. She seems to play fine without any hickups. Going to play with it more over the weekend.

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Maryus Ionel

... i have around 90-95% GPU usage and around 50% CPU usage (Q6600@2,4) when i export something or when i play something. I have a 7 min screen capture at 1680x1050 and i tried to export it H.264 HDTV 1080p. Without GPU-acceleration it estimated around 60 min, i wait more than 15 sec and not even 1% done, when i change to GPU it estimated around 9-10 min and in a few second it has 5% progress :D.

Does this mean that Mercury Playback Engine also assists in the encoding of files to disk? I thought it was only a playback feature. Am I wrong?

Or am I missing the boat here?

[Maryus Ionel]

Well actually MPE can export to disk, can make effects, playback and other in CUDA. Actually Premiere CS5 is almost top to bottom CUDA :). You can see some demos on youtube about exporting.

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Is anyone having any problems with their Nvidia cards (specifically the GTX 480) and power consumption?

The Nvida specs say that the MINIMUM recommended system power is 600 Watts. My system (that I thought was pretty beefy) is only 480 watts.

I was just about the click the purchase button when I saw this. Any thoughts?

[Lars Siden]

Lloyd Ubshura,

A full system with a 480 card consumes 400w at peak.

Your 480w delivers as best 85% of 480 = 408w, so you are walking on the thin red line there.

I'd go for the Corsair 750w modular PSU as well.

// LAsse

[Adam Gold]

I just ordered a new custom built system with the 480. An online power calculator showed the system would draw 612W and recommended a 650W PS. I included a Corsair 850W PS just to play it safe.

[David Knarr]

Hi Ozan,

I was having Premiere CS5 cash on me when using additive dissolves and fast blur in & out when I was using the 257.21 drive. This was happening on a couple of our systems. I have 8 systems running CS5 and 3 are giving me problems under 257.21 drivers.

No problems under the 197.45 drivers even with the additive dissolves and fast blur in & out. The problem doesn't seen to be with any certain video card either, as I've tried several in these systems.

It's got to be something with the new drivers and these few of systems.

[David Knarr]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

I have only judged that based on my view of the performance list in the PPBM4 site. I do not currently own any NVIDIA cards with more than 512MB of RAM, which cannot run MPE in GPU-accelerated mode at all. And I do not have a GTX 4xx series card at all due to its cost that's much higher than I can afford right now. Because of this, I can call my findings as "hearsay" or "inconclusive".

By the way, the 9400 GT is the exact same GPU as the 9500 GT but with half of the G96 GPU's 32 stream processors disabled internally at the manufacturing level.

Hi Randall,

Just to let you know, the GTX 470 works great with the hack and both sets of drivers, the 197.45 and 257.21driver. Everything ran smoothly on the system I used to test it.

Getting a GTX 480 in here latter in the week to try.

[Jay Bloomfield]

Originally Posted by John Hewat

Does this mean that Mercury Playback Engine also assists in the encoding of files to disk? I thought it was only a playback feature. Am I wrong?

Or am I missing the boat here?

The first step in encoding is to render the timeline. The MPE assists in that step. However, the actually encoding is done by whatever codec you choose for output and the MPE has no effect on that step. MainConcept sells an H.264 codec that utilizes CUDA and that would speed up encoding additionally, if you were to use that codec. Most codecs are written to utilize the CPU(s), so a fast CPU is till the best way of improving encoding times.

The net result of all this is that the MPE may improve encoding times from only marginally to significantly, depending on whether rendering the timeline is the limiting step or utilizing the codec is limiting.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by David Knarr

Hi Randall,

Just to let you know, the GTX 470 works great with the hack and both sets of drivers, the 197.45 and 257.21driver. Everything ran smoothly on the system I used to test it.

Getting a GTX 480 in here latter in the week to try.

From the result, I can conclude that that system's slow performance on exports is the result of a less-than-optimal memory configuration: There is no way that one can run 16GB of RAM on a 1366 system in proper triple-channel. That system had been running in a Flex mode of mixed triple- and single-channel mode. What that does is increase the total latency of the i7's memory controller, causing everything to run slower than expected. I confirmed this after inspecting the PPBM4 result of a GTX 480 system with MPE turned off: That system's export times were about the same as most of the other high-ranked systems with MPE off.

[Ozan Biron]

Originally Posted by David Knarr

Hi Ozan,

I was having Premiere CS5 cash on me when using additive dissolves and fast blur in & out when I was using the 257.21 drive. This was happening on a couple of our systems. I have 8 systems running CS5 and 3 are giving me problems under 257.21 drivers.

No problems under the 197.45 drivers even with the additive dissolves and fast blur in & out. The problem doesn't seen to be with any certain video card either, as I've tried several in these systems.

It's got to be something with the new drivers and these few of systems.

Hey david,

im trying to re-create your problems... ive tried appplying fast blurr and additive dissolve into various of cross fades and in and out key points. I do get a red bar for the additive dissolve. But still seems to play ok. I havent installed 197.45 and to compare it with 257.21.

[David Knarr]

Hi Ozan,

Well I spent the day wiping the hard drive in 1 of the 3 systems that have been giving me a problem with the 257.21 drivers. I reloaded just Windows 7 64bit, the 257.21 NVIDIA driver and Premiere CS5. The problem is gone!

I guess I will be reloading the other 2 systems over the next few days. I went back and loaded 257.21 on the 5 computers that had no problem with it before and they are still running fine.

[Ozan Biron]

Is there suppose to be a special setup when setting up the gtx series. I read somewhere that tweaking is need or something.

[David Knarr]

I am not doing anything special other than following the directions for the hack. It's worked with all the different cards I've tried.

I also have all my computers working under 257.21 WHQL drivers. The 3 computer's I had problems with I had to do a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit, then the driver, then CS5. Now all 8 systems are running the 257.21 drivers and no problems yet. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[Ozan Biron]

Originally Posted by Martin Guitar

I figured out how to activate CUDA acceleration without a GTX 285 or Quadro... I'm pretty sure it should work with other 200 GPUs. Note that i'm using 2 monitors and there's a extra tweak to play with CUDA seamlessly with 2 monitors.

I ment this.... special setup for 2 monitors?!? "extra tweak"