MPE GTX470 question
 

Hey guys I just installed a GTX 470 and something's not quite right.
I verified that the card is on the compatible list for the Mercury Playback Engine.
When I playback video from my NX5 the CPU goes to 100% while the GPU stays at around 11%.

Any advice?

Q6600 processor, 8GB of RAM, RAID 0, GTX 470 video card.

Running drivers up to date as of 10-23-10 on all devices.

Hello,

Not all effects in Premiere are GPU-accelerated, for starters. In fact, if you did not apply any effects at all, the playback will be mostly CPU-based.

So just normal everyday playback in Premiere CS5 is not concentrated on the GPU rather than the CPU.

I'm not adding any effects to my clips, I'm talking importing and playing from the timeline.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, the CPU still has to decode the frames, then not all effects are GPU accelerated. There are about 40 effects in PPro CS5 that are. There is an icon behind the effect name in the Video Effects panel if it uses the GPU, and fortunately, most of the commonly used ones do. No icon, no acceleration and you'll see a red bar in the sequence timeline.

If you do need to use an effect that's not accelerated, tweak it and then disable it in the Effects Control panel so it doesn't bog down the system while editing.

So the GPU is only used for effects?
I thought the whole idea was that it is able to play back just about any resolution of any file type in real time.

I'm rendering out a little video from my NX5 right now and have included a screen shot that shows both the render screen, the CPU usage screen and the GPU usage screen.

I could be completely wrong here but it just seems like something isn't right.

And thanks for the tip on editing with non-accelerated effects. That's good information.

John,

See the answer I gave on the Adobe forums.

My very first impression when I saw that demo from adobe where they trew all kind of footage on a timeline was also that the gpu did all that. If I remember right (if not pls correct me) that demo system they used for this online presentation was a dual 6 core pc meaning 12 real or 24 cores if you count the virtual ones" as well and it had 24gb of memory and a 4800 nvidia card. No wonder it flew. I think it surprised some users with older systems thinking a approved graphics card would speed everything up, especially because in that presentation was not mentioned you still needed sufficient cpu power as well (and lots of memory)

Agreed.
I'm somehwat disappointed.

Harm, you're everywhere!

Noa, you are correct with the specs of that demo machine.

John, did you solve the script problem you had? Contact me by PM if you still have problems or have the results ready.

And I guess I should add, "Re-enable the effect before rendering the final product!"

Well, I can understand getting caught up in the pre-release marketing buzz; I've certainly fallen victim to such disappointment in previous releases. But a couple of comments that I hope will temper your feelings:

- it was publically known and discussed that Adobe was demo'ing on high end machines (no surprise -- even if it wasn't known, it would certainly be assumed!)

- the simple fact is that when processing HD, over sixty million pixels have to be processed for every second of video, for each stream. If you're laying complex math on many or all of those pixels (eg effects), a slower system is just not going to be able to handle the data load in real time or faster.

- also widely discussed was the assumption -- which turned out to be wrong -- that CS5 minimum system requirements would be on the extreme high end. Well, as always "the faster, the better" but as you all are showing, an old quad core is useable. Happy me, like many folks I built a new machine just for CS5 and almost everything I do is in realtime or near to it. Yet, if you're using an older system, at least you CAN still use CS5 and its many new features, even if it doesn't sprint. It still is more efficient than previous versions.

- We're at the beginning of the GPU acceleration epoch. Even though CS5 was a huge leap forward, I'm sure we'll see a great deal more optimization in the future.

I have the same q6600 processor, just curious John; did you have the opportunity to play native dslr 1080p footage straight from the timeline? I just wonder if cs5 is able to handle one layer in realtime on a Q6600 processor. (only for preview, i guess that scrolling the timeline without stutter is not possible on that processor)

I was running a Geforce 9800 before I changed it out with the GTX 470.

And yes I was able to play a full resolution 1080P timeline without problems.

I mainly bought the card so I can have the best most capable system I can. And because I thought it would help with the export process.

And no Harm I did not get the VBS problem resolved. All the steps in the text file work perfectly until I get to the running the script part. Then it gives an error, but it does make the Output.txt file. The file is blank however.

I'll try it again and pass along what the error is.

Even with all this new clarified information I still couldn't grasp the idea of moving to an NLE other than Premiere.

Thanks again fellas.

Agreed. I was one of those skeptics when CS5 was in development, that a dual-CPU system with 24GB or more RAM was "required" just to use the program at all. But later in the development stage, I have migrated to the belief that a typical consumer dual- or quad-core system with the proper GPU (please note: no IGPs; they run like you-know-what and steals too much RAM from the system) with 4GB to 8GB of RAM is usable with CS5 but an i7-9xx or better system with 12GB or more RAM is better.

My Premiere Pro Benchmark results
 

Hello Mr. Harm.
Here are my results from the benchmark.
I've attached both the GPU accelerated results and the software accelerated results.

Thanks.

CUDA acceleration used for more than just effects
 

I just wanted to clear up some confusion that I noticed on this thread:

CUDA acceleration isn't just for effects. Some other things are processed on the GPU and accelerated by CUDA processing, too. Deinterlacing and scaling are among them.

But, as has been said on this thread, encoding is just done on the CPU.

John, I'm not Harm, but judging by the PPBM5 list your 979-second overall result makes it the second slowest of all of the systems that have MPE-enabled configurations (and the slowest of all of the MPE-enabled systems running 5.0.2 by far). The only MPE-enabled system that's slower than your system (and only nine seconds slower, at that) is a laptop with a GT 330M running 5.0.1.

And though your MPE result is 11.4x faster than with MPE off, it is still slower than what the majority of systems with that same GPU typically achieve.

With such slow times, it's no wonder why your CPU utilisation is maxed out while your GPU utilisation barely touches 10%. Plus, your system's motherboard uses an nForce chipset (which is very buggy) instead of an Intel chipset. That makes overclocking stability iffy with that system. Besides turning off or disabling some background processes there's not much that you can do short of a complete CPU/motherboard/RAM upgrade, in this particular case (especially since an upgraded LGA 775 CPU would cost too much money for such modest performance gains and might not be even supported at all by your motherboard even with a BIOS update). And forget about a second GPU in SLI because MPE currently supports only one GPU.

John,

I saw your results and will incorporate them in the results list, unless you first want to try some optimizations on your system. Just let me know.

One thing is not clear from your results: the two disk project disk, is that configured as raid0 or raid1?

I wonder if you have tuned your system, for instance by turning off compression and indexing on all your disks? How many processes are running in the background? If that number is over 50 it is time to clean up.

Although this article says Vista, it also applies to Win 7: Adobe Forums: Guide for installing and tuning a Vista.... It may help to fine tune your system and get your results in the 700 seconds range.

Harm,

I read John's original post. The two-disk project volume is configured as RAID 0.

Thanks Randall.

Todd, great to have an Adobe voice here, thanks!

Yeah, I've had occasion recently to have to rotate and scale some AVCHD and in doing so it became obvious that the Fixed Effects (Motion, Opacity, etc in the Effects Panel) must be accelerated. Didn't know about de-interlacing. Would you be able to tell us what additional functions use GPU acceleration? Could be very helpful for some folks' workflows to know.

BTW, despite my reluctance to even try it, I was quite amazed that the final AME output of aforementioned AVCHD footage with a 1 degree rotation scaled to 103% was absolutely indistinguishable from footage that wasn't rotated and scaled, both on a computer monitor and a Big Screen (106" 1080p home theater projector). I expected visual degradation but couldn't see any. Kudos to the team!

As you may have noticed, I've been around for a few years, mostly lurking.

I just wrote an article about the details of the scaling done on the GPU (plus some other details of CUDA processing).

And, of course, there are the GPU-accelerated effects.

As I mentioned, deinterlacing is GPU-accelerated.

Also, blending modes are GPU-accelerated.

I might be missing something, but I think that's about it.

Todd,

This is exactly what I noticed. Creating a downconverted standard-definition video clip from a high-definition original does use the GPU for the deinterlacing, reinterlacing and downscaling. I noticed the GPU's fan ramp up during this process.

On the other hand, simply creating a 1080i AVC Blu-ray copy of a 1080i Cineform AVI source clip uses mostly the CPU.

Do you have a link, please?

Peter, here you are: Adobe Forums: MPE and GTX 470

I was very shocked myself when I found out the the mercury playback engine wasn't going to be as good as I thought but every little power helps and that's why I'm getting a GTX470 card for my computer.
This is what I have on order.
Micro Center - Galaxy KFA2 GeForce GTX 470 Galaxy-clocked 1280MB PCIe 2.0 x16 Video Card 70XKH3HS3CUB
Not a bad card for Premiere CS5 editing, right? I have to say that building a new computer is really giving me a very big headache. I though the amount of money I'm spending on it was already torture. I'll probably feel much better on the first day editing on it.

I also found it shocking editing native TM700 files on my college's Mac Pro computers with a couple of quad-core processors, 4 gigs of RAM and an ATI card. Premiere CS5 ran flawless with those files. It's still always best to play it safe and get a compatible NVidia card in case a lot of certain effects are used.

Thanks for the link, Harm.

It's understandable that the CPU does some of the legwork... :)

I think it's still safe to say that you don't need a GTX 470 to get the full benefits of MPE. A GTS 450 should be plenty for Premiere's current usage of the GPU. It's guesstimated that it only uses around 100 cores so even a GT 240 may suffice for lower end systems.

Wow I never felt so bad about my system til I started talking to you guys.

But seriously I have an upgrade planned, it just hasn't happened yet.

I'm not saying my system or the processing in Premiere is slow by any means, just wasn't what I expected with the new GPU.

And yes I am running a quad core.
And yes right this second there are 58 processes running on my system.

I have never compressed any of my drives before and I have completely turned off Indexing.

And yes the two disk drive is Raid 0. I needed the speed.

Oh and I haven't done any overclocking at all to my system.
Never wanted to risk it.