Re: Unsupported GPU for CS5
d4digital Jul 17, 2010 9:33 AMHi Harm,
I hope it is appropriate to reply to this post. It seemed as good as any in this thread. I have read your posts for years and learn't a great deal from you - you seem to have a great deal of experience in this area. I'm having several rather strange issues with CS5, MPE, the GTX480, playback and artefacts which I am trusting you may be able to assist with. I think that this conversation might help others too as it bring together a lot of information. I'm more than happy to provide additional info but here is some basics to get us started. I will be as brief as I can.
The rig: Windows 7 64-Bit, ASUS P5Q Pro, 8GB RAM, Intel Q9650 Core 2 Quad 3.0GHz (OC'd at 3.51 GHz), Gigabyte GTX480 PSU (Core voltage up to 1125mV, Core clock OC'd to 730MHz), Corsair HX 850W PSU, 7TB Enterprise RAID 5 array (avg@700MB/sec W/R), Dell 30" and Dell 2408 for monitoring.
The CPU is watercooled and hums along between 20c - 26c degrees depending on load and the GPU is surprisingly cool even with the two monitors idling at around 60c and about 75c under heavy loads. So all is well and certainly powerful enough for HDV video editing I assume. My drivers are up to date and I have been running between the 257.21 series and 258.69 and 258.96 beta versions and am currently on the latter but am oscillating between them to test what works. All produce the same results. I have used driver sweeper and the usual processes for these tweaks.
I have been using CS4 for around a year editing HDV for documentary and corporate work and was previously using an 8800GTS @ stock clocks with a lesser 650W PSU. Playback was always smooth as silk and I had very few issues with PPro or AE for that matter. Sure rendering and encoding took a while but that was CS4!
So after upgrading amid the hype of CS5 and MPE, I moved perhaps too quickly to the GTX480 and applied the 'Hack' with the possibly incorrect assumption that we would see full Adobe support for these cards soon. I expected some instability/issues but am always up for new tech. I have worked in IT and media for 20 years, built all my machines for years and am technically proficient. But this issue has me stumped.
GPUSniffer:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS5>GPUSniffer.exe -k
Device: 0000000000304208 has video RAM(MB): 1536
Vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer string: GeForce GTX 480/PCI/SSE2
Version string: 3.0.0
OpenGL version as determined by Extensionator...
OpenGL Version 3.0
Supports shaders!
Supports BGRA -> BGRA Shader
Supports VUYA Shader -> BGRA
Supports UYVY/YUYV ->BGRA Shader
Supports YUV 4:2:0 -> BGRA Shader
Testing for CUDA support...
Found 1 devices supporting CUDA.
CUDA Device # 0 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 480 Compute capability: 2.0
Total Video Memory: 1503MB
CUDA driver version: 3010
CUDA Device # 0 supported.
Completed shader test!
Internal return value: 7
The problem: Instead of better performance, everything has gone the opposite direction. I am experiencing intermittent playback and artefacts on some moving footage, the occasional hang/crash and one or two BSOD's, but quite rarely. Encoding flies however, what would normally take 1 hour to encode now takes 10 mins when direct from PPro and not the Media Encoder, which is amazing but not so useful in the edit when playback has degradated. Things playout but to my editing eye, I can see what looks like stuttering. In fact watching the playback head, it appears to be flashing when passing over some sequences and the result looks like drop frames. I'm in Sydney, OZ, so in PAL land and am acquiring and editing in 1440x1080/25p (SONY HVR-Z7P). It's all progressive, not interlaced for 99% of my footage. On top of this a test burn of MPEG2 DVD (widescreen PAL) produced jumps at every edit point when viewing on a plasma screen. WTF? Not only that, but it looked awful - colour was desaturated and there was a distinct drop in the red channel.
In addition, I am also seeing what looks like pixelation on some pans and tilts and god forbid what appears to be interlacing on complex lighting such as neon signs for example. People passing the camera up close in shot also seem to pixelate badly. None of this has ever ocurred before. Also, applying a simple so-called 'accelerated effect' such as Dip to Black or Cross dissolve brings the red render bar immediately. The type of improvements shown in this Adobe video http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-premiere-pro-cs5/gpuaccelerated-effect-performance-enhance ments/ appear to simply not apply in many cases. Other accelerated effects work fine and some non-accelerated effects seem to have improved! Another whacky thing is that if I do import an interlaced clip from say, a handycam from one of my Operator's 2nd unit cutaways and interpret footage and scale to frame size to bring it in, then apply 'Always deinterlace', apprently nothing happens. The footage looks exactly the same whereas in CS4 an immediate change was apparent to the interlacing.
Changes: The only change to the traditional setup I had with CS4 apart from hardware upgrades was movng the CS5 DB and cache to the RAID array as it was previously on the boot drive (tut tut I know, but it never affected performance. Go figure?). New projects re-indexed after this move and the timeline went green and all looked good. Until I started playback. That is when I really noticed things going wrong and still suspect the media cache and DB have something to do with this. Indexing is OFF on the array as well, as I know that it can cause performance hits as WIN hammers the drives constantly for info.
Now, I rarely have more than 3 layers of video including supers, so I am not pushing it. To make things even stranger, sometimes playback seems ok for a while but soon returns to this jerky, stuttering motion. As PPro has no fps monitor (ADOBE - new feature request please for 5.1.1) it's hard to tell what is coming out and I don't really want to install FRAPS to check.
Ghost in the Machine: What's going on Harm? Any idea's? What I am missing? Things seem unpredictable. It's killing me and my business. I realise the card is unsupported but I'm reading alot about people applying the hack and getting great results. Including yourself I believe with the 480.
Thoughts:
- Nvidia driver support in 358 series problem
- Bad card
- Tweaks/config in NTune wrong
- Adobe GTX480 support
- Background services vs. Programs - what's better?
- Some crazy setting in PPro I have wrong but can't find
- PhysX playing havoc with something
- HDMI out vs. DVI
- The flickering playhead is a giveaway - but what does it mean other than it is struggling? Why would this build struggle? This machine should be in the basement at CERN!
- The media cache and DB are corrupted or shouldn't be on the RAID (can move to a Raptor if needed).
- The array and boot drive need a defrag
- A big possibility might be rebuilding the current project from scratch. I have done the open new project, import old sequence, etc, to no avail. I can't find any info on how to completely rebuild a project sequence by deleting the cache and db completely and forcing PPro to remake all it's media reference associations on one or ALL projects. A handy feature if it doesn't exist Adobe!
Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated. Anyone else who is experiencing anything like this or can help (Adobe, Jeff, Chuck, Shooternz or other Community Pro's) PLEASE chime in!
Thanks Harm.
Thanks everyone.






