For those that purchased Premiere CS5 with the hopes of CPU Acceleration via the Mercury playback engine and not having a compatible card, there is now hope!  Thanks to a “hack” posted on DVInfo we can now add support for other 200 series graphics cards.  Note, that there still seems to be  memory limitation on the graphics cards.  It seems that 765MB of memory to enable.  Ok here we go:

Step 1. Go to the Premiere CS5 installation folder.
Step 2. Find the file “GPUSniffer.exe” and run it in a command prompt (cmd.exe). You should see something like that:

———————————————————————————————————————————–
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer string: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2
Version string: 3.0.0

OpenGL version as determined by Extensionator…
OpenGL Version 2.0
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 2 devices supporting CUDA.
CUDA Device # 0 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 1 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 0 not choosen because it did not match the named list of cards
Completed shader test!
Internal return value: 7
—————————————————————————————————————————————

If you look at the last line it says the CUDA device is not chosen because it’s not in the named list of card. That’s fine. Let’s add it.

Step 3. Find the file: “cuda_supported_cards.txt” and edit it and add your card (take the name from the line: CUDA device details: Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
So in my case the name to add is: GeForce GTX 295

Step 4. Save that file and we’re almost ready.
Step 5. Go to your Nvidia Drivercontrol panel (im using the latest 197.45) under “Manage 3D Settings”, Click “Add” and browse to your Premiere CS5 install directory and select the executable file: “Adobe Premiere Pro.exe”
Step 6. In the field “multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration” switch from “multiple display performance mode” to “compatibilty performance mode”
Step 7. That’s it. Boot Premiere and go to your project setting / general and activate CUDA

So far, this works with a 295 and 260 cards.  Hopefully someone with a new 480/470 cards can try this method as well.

Big thanks to Martin Guitar for finding this.

Tags: Adobe, Adobe Premiere, CS5 Hack, GPU Acceleration, Mercury Playback, NVidia, Premiere CS5

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 9:56 amand is filed under Video Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.