Is Premiere Pro telling you that you need to enable GPU acceleration to use certain effects, or do you just want a boost in performance by handing off some of the grunt work to your graphics card? Whatever the case may be, we'll show you how to get GPU acceleration running inside Adobe's video editor.
Enable GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro
Depending on the type of effects you use in your videos, GPU acceleration can greatly impact performance. That's because graphics cards, with their many, many processing cores, are typically a lot faster at rendering than even high-end CPUs. With that being the case, if you have a GPU in your system and you're not allowing Premiere Pro to use it, you're leaving a lot of performance on the table.
In addition, Premiere Pro has some effects that you simply cannot use without a GPU. You'll be greeted by an error that reads, "This effect requires GPU acceleration." Here's how to fix it:
- Inside Premiere Pro, go to File > Project Settings.
- Select General.
- Under Video Rendering & Playback, select Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration.
- Click OK.
You're all done and ready to take advantage of GPU acceleration.
Using a GPU with Premiere Pro
If you do not see the option to enable GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro, you may need to update the drivers for your graphics card, or your GPU is incompatible. However, the latter is unlikely if you have a fairly modern device, given that Adobe says all GPUs are supported, and its minimum requirement is only 2GB of VRAM (although at least 4GB is recommended).
It's worth noting that even with GPU acceleration enabled, much of the processing Premiere Pro needs will still be carried out by your CPU, with your GPU chipping in to help out when the workload calls for it. For effects that take advantage of GPU acceleration, you should see a small "Accelerated Effects" indicator alongside each in the Effects panel.
In addition to effects, Premiere Pro will use GPU acceleration for image processing, resizes, color space conversions, and more.
Give Premiere Pro GPU power
If you're a regular Premiere Pro user and have a computer with a GPU, you're doing yourself a disservice by not enabling GPU acceleration. It's not only required for some effects but can also bring noticeable performance gains to everyday tasks. What's more, it's super simple to activate, so there's really no reason not to.
Not happy with Premiere Pro even with GPU acceleration enabled? There are lots of other great video editing apps for Windows that are worth a look. There's also Clipchamp, a free editing app built into Microsoft's operating system for those with simple requirements.