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Enabling Mercury Playback Engine Support on unsupported AMD graphic cards in Premiere Pro CS 6


H84YM
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Hello!

 

-------- scroll down to SHORT MANUAL for a, well, short manual --------

 

There are guides around explaining how to enable OpenCL support in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on unsupported AMD graphics cards in order to use the "Mercury Playback Engine". Since I was not successful with any of these, I decided to take a closer look and found a hint in an Application called "GPUSniffer".

This may work with CS 5(.5) also but I have not tested it.

 

The Mercury Playback engine is a rendering technology which uses graphics acceleration for faster rendering and realtime playback of video in Premiere Pro supporting most effects in Premiere Pro saving CPU power by using GPU rendering.

 

If you start Premiere Pro CS 6 on a Hackintosh without a compatible graphics card and open up an new project you will notice that the first box in the "general" tab is greyed out, showing only "Mercury Playback Engine - software only" as an option. That is because Premiere Pro is checking with two text files called "opencl_supported_cards.txt" for OpenCL capable cards (as most cards are) and "cuda_supported_cards.txt" for CUDA capable cards (NVIDIA only).

 

Unfortunately the list of supported cards is a short read. For OpenCL cards it's:

 

ATI Radeon HD 6750M

ATI Radeon HD 6770M
GeForce GT 650M
 
Now if you start Premiere Pro and the "name" of your graphics card is not in the list, OpenCL acceleration is not being used.
I have a AMD Radeon HD 6850, which is not supported and therefore had to find a solution for me. I didn't want to buy a new card so I was looking for an answer around the interwebs.
 
There are guides out there which tell you to
1. go to "About this mac..."
2. go to "More information..."
3. find the identifier text next to "graphics card" (for me that was "AMD Radeon HD 6850 Series 1024 MB")
4. copy that text without the "series" and "1024 MB" (so it's "AMD Radeon HD 6850")
5. and paste it into "opencl_supported_cards.txt", just beneath the others
 
Tried this, didn't work
 
But I was sure my card had OpenCL capabilities so  I went on and found an application inside the "Premiere Pro CS 6.app" (right-click - show package contents) which was called GPUSniffer.app. Once again right-click - show package contents. Inside the contents folder I found links to both the graphics card list files as well as the GPUSniffer inside the MacOS folder.
I ran that application (right-click - open) and it gave me this:
 
dlopen "/usr/local/cuda/lib/libcuda.dylib" failed!
dlopen "/usr/local/cuda/lib/libcuda.dylib" failed!
--- OpenGL Info ---
2013-12-06 13:43:18.175 GPUSniffer[1068:707] invalid drawable
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Renderer: ATI Radeon Barts PRO Prototype OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.1 ATI-1.6.37
GLSL Version: 1.20
Monitors: 1
Monitor 0 properties -
   Size: (0, 0, 1920, 1080)
   Max texture size: 16384
   Supports non-power of two: 1
   Shaders 444: 1
   Shaders 422: 1
   Shaders 420: 1
 
 
--- GPU Computation Info ---
Found 1 devices supporting GPU computation.
OpenCL Device 0 - 
   Name: ATI Radeon Barts PRO Prototype
   Capability: 1.2
   Driver: 1.1
   Total Video Memory: 1024MB
   Not chosen because it did not match the named list of cards
logout
 
 
The interesting part is at the very bottom.
At the end it reads my graphics card was not chosen because it did not match the named list of cards. The "Name" string four lines above explains it all. The name that GPUSniffer reads out for your graphics card has to match the one in the list file. For some people maybe the Graphics card identifier in system profiler could be the same for them as GPUSniffer determines. Maybe it worked for them because of that. Whe I put the name that GPUSniffer gave me into "opencl_supported_cards.txt" and fired up Premiere Pro CS6 I got the "hardware acceleration" option and rendering was much faster for most effects.
 
 
 
----------------------------------SHORT MANUAL-----------------------------------
 
You should get TextWrangler first if you don't have a good Text Editing software that can handle files which need admin privileges.
 
1. go to "/Applications/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.app/Contents/GPUSniffer.app/Contents/MacOS"
2. run "GPUSniffer" (right-click - open; you dont need administrator privileges)
2. copy the text after "Name:" at the bottom of the output
3. go to "/Applications/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.app/Contents"
4. open "opencl_supported_cards.txt" with TextWrangler (right-click - open)
5. paste the text under the other graphics cards
6. save and exit
7. open Premiere Pro
 
WARNING: I cannot imagine Adobe has blocked most graphics cards just for fun. I have not had any crashes, hangs or whatever since I activated my card, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen to you! Back up your data regularily and for important or professional editing better choose a supported card, just in case.
 
Greetings,
 
H84YM
 
PS: Sorry for my English, I'm German  :wink_anim:
 
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