Why GPU-based processing?

As you surely know, the modern versions of Premiere Pro and its render core — Mercury Engine — can use both CPU (central processor) and GPU (graphic processor) to process video. Using GPU processing usually allows to speed up editing, previewing, rendering and export.

To fully enable GPU-based processing, a computer must have a Premiere-compatible GPU with sufficient video memory (VRAM), updated video drivers, GPU-enabled video effects, transitions, etc. All those elements must be in place to support a GPU-based workflow in your projects.

Let’s check those elements one by one.

Basics: Mercury Engine

Premiere Pro

First, we need to make sure that Premiere’s Mercury Playback Engine can and does use the GPU of your computer:

1. Open Premiere Pro and load your project.
    
2. Go to File > Project Settings > General.
    
3. Under the Video Rendering and Playback section, find the Renderer dropdown.
    
4. Select Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (choose CUDA, Metal, or OpenCL, depending on your system).
   
   If you have two or more GPU Acceleration options in the list, select one corresponding to the fastest GPU in your system.
   
   Please also make sure the chosen GPU’s memory (VRAM) satisfies the memory requirements of Premiere and memory requirements of Neat Video. If there is not enough VRAM, then using such GPU may in some cases lead to a slowdown instead of increasing the processing speed.
    
5. Click OK to save your settings.
   
   

Media Encoder

If you plan to export your project using Media Encoder, then please verify that Media Encoder’s Mercury Playback Engine is set to use the GPU as well:

1. Open Media Encoder.
    
2. Go to Edit > Preferences > General.
    
3. Under the Video Rendering section, find the Renderer dropdown.
    
4. Select Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (choose CUDA, Metal, or OpenCL, depending on your system).
   
   If you have two or more GPU Acceleration options in the list, select one corresponding to the fastest GPU in your system.
    
5. Click OK to save your settings.

Video effects and transitions

All effects you use in your project should be GPU accelerated to ensure the best performance.

GPU-accelerated effects are marked with a small GPU acceleration icon in the Effects panel:

Many of Premiere’s built-in effects are already GPU-accelerated. The new Neat Video 6 does fully support the GPU-based workflow of Premiere as well.

Some video effects only support CPU processing. Even a single CPU-only effect applied to a clip will at least partially turn GPU acceleration off for that clip and it will be processed slower. Also, such per-clip switching from GPU processing to CPU processing may cause Premiere to produce slightly different visual results like tinted colors and, in extreme cases, banding and clipping. Normally, there should be no visual difference but Premiere has certain problems in this area and its CPU vs GPU processing may produce different results. This is why it is important to avoid that switching and to maintain the GPU-based workflow across all clips, or to fully switch to the slower CPU-based workflow.

GPU-accelerated Neat Video 6

In addition to the GPU-based video processing traditionally used by Neat Video internally, the Neat Video 6 plug-in for Premiere introduces the Premiere GPU interface option, which essentially makes it a GPU-accelerated effect for the purposes of Premiere’s GPU-based workflow. This option is enabled by default, and the corresponding GPU acceleration icon is displayed in the Effects panel of Premiere to reflect this new capability.

The option can be disabled in Neat Video Preferences (manually or as a result of a technical issue with the GPU drivers), so please verify that it is enabled there:

1. Open Neat Video’s window (where you build a noise profile for your clip).
    
2. Go to Tools > Preferences > Performance.
    
3. Verify that the Advanced box shows the “Premiere GPU interface enabled” label.
   
   
   
   
   If it is not enabled, go to the Advanced Settings and make sure that “Enable Premiere GPU interface” is checked. Then click OK twice and click Apply.
   
   

Note: The older versions of Neat Video did not support Premiere GPU interface. They used GPU to reduce noise, but the GPU interface of Premiere was not supported and therefore Premiere could not enable its GPU-based workflow fully. The new Neat Video 6 can use the GPU interface to exchange data with Premiere and also use the GPU for noise reduction, which together ensures higher performance overall. This may require some extra GPU resources, so please make sure your system satisfies the memory requirements.

Export

Once your project is ready for the final render and export, you can either export it directly from Premiere or send the project to Media Encoder for processing. In either case, these applications should already be set to use the GPU for rendering (if you followed the recommendations from the section ‘Basics: Mercury Engine’ above). So we will not need to double-check that now.

Encoding and decoding

Besides rendering, one more element of Premiere and Media Encoder can also use GPU for potential acceleration: video codecs.

The recent versions of Premiere Pro and Media Encoder support several hardware-accelerated codecs and some of those codecs (such as H.264, HEVC/H.265 and ProRes on Mac) also offer options to directly enable/disable the hardware acceleration for encoding and decoding. This usually allows editing, previewing and export operations to be completed faster than with the regular software (CPU-based) decoding/encoding.

To enable the hardware decoding and encoding in Premiere Pro:

1. Go to Edit menu > Preferences > Media…
    
2. Enable the available hardware acceleration encoding option(s).
    
3. Enable the available hardware acceleration decoding option(s).
    
4. Restart the application.

Then please repeat the above steps in Media Encoder as well.

What if something doesn’t work

What happens if one or more components of the rendering workflow don’t support GPU-based processing or that mode is not enabled? Then either all or part of the render workflow switches to CPU-based processing, becomes slower and may also produce slightly different visual results.

Let’s check the points where that can happen in Premiere:

1. GPU is not available in Mercury Engine of Premiere or Media Encoder (in Preferences).
   
   If the GPU Acceleration option is not available or the whole dropdown is disabled (and set to Software only), please check the GPU and GPU driver requirements of Premiere and make sure your GPU is compatible and its drivers satisfy the requirements of Premiere. Update the drivers if necessary.
    
2. GPU is enabled in Mercury Engine of Premiere Pro, but not Media Encoder. In this case, the playback and render in Premiere itself will be GPU accelerated but when you export via Media Encoder, it will use the CPU for processing and will be slower. Also, the results may be visually slightly different. Please make sure the Mercury Engine settings are the same in both Premiere and Media Encoder to avoid that.
    
3. If any of the video effects applied in one of the clips in your project are not GPU accelerated, then this will force Premiere to use the CPU to render all preceding effects applied to that clip. The effects after those CPU-only ones may still be processed using the GPU, but the overall speed may still suffer. The visual results may be slightly different too because some built-in effects of Premiere produce different results in the CPU vs GPU processing mode.
   
   What you can do in such a situation:
    
   • Do not use a specific CPU-only effect. This will eliminate its negative influence on performance and visual results.
      
   • Change the order of effects: place all CPU-only effects before* all GPU-accelerated ones. This will limit the negative impact of the CPU-only effects on performance. The impact on the visual results may still remain. Check that directly by inspecting the preview in Premiere.
     
     * Usually that means the above but also see the article on the order of effect processing in Premiere.
      
   • Separately apply the CPU-only effect(s) and GPU-enabled effects using intermediate video files and separate projects.
      
4. If there is not enough VRAM on the GPU to satisfy the requirements of Premiere, Neat Video and possibly other effects and codecs used in the project, then the render/export may slow down even when all GPU acceleration options are enabled. Please verify that the GPU’s VRAM satisfies the memory requirements of Premiere and the memory requirements of Neat Video. If there is a shortage of VRAM, then consider the following options:
    
   • Reduce the amount of VRAM allowed to Neat Video for video processing: go to Neat Video 6’s Preferences > Performance, select Manual mode, reduce the GPU memory setting.
      
   • Disable use of GPU in Neat Video for video processing: set Neat Video 6 to Manual mode in Preferences and switch off the GPU completely.
      
   • If you have two GPU options in Premiere’s Mercury Engine, for example, CUDA (with an NVIDIA GPU) and OpenCL (with an integrated GPU), assign one of those options (OpenCL and its GPU) to Premiere itself (in Premiere Preferences), and another one (CUDA and its NVIDIA GPU) — to Neat Video (in its Preferences).

How to detect a GPU acceleration problem

1. Red bar above a clip
   When Premiere Pro changes the color of the bar shown on top of a specific clip from yellow to red, it often means that some of the effects or transitions applied to the clip are not GPU accelerated. When all applied effects are GPU accelerated, the bar color is usually yellow:
   
   
   
   Premiere Pro may also show the red bars when there is a general shortage of resources (memory, video memory). You can check if that is the case by monitoring the memory resources using Task Manager (Windows), Activity Monitor (macOS) or similar tools.
    
2. Difference in visual results
   Another sign of a switch from GPU- to CPU-based processing in Premiere Pro is a difference in visual results, like tinted colors and, in extreme cases, banding and clipping that can be seen in the preview of Premiere Pro. If you flip a specific effect or transition on and off and notice such a visual difference showing up, then this may indicate the GPU to CPU switch, which you do not want.
    
3. Litmus test using VR Color Gradients
   If you have one or more video effects (and/or transitions) applied to a clip and you want to directly check whether Premiere Pro processes all those effects using the GPU, there is a simple test that can be used. You can temporarily add one more effect — VR Color Gradients — to the top of the list of those effects (it is important to add it to the top, just below Time Remapping, not to the bottom after all other effects) and observe the preview in Premiere. If the preview shows color gradient patterns instead of a regular frame, then that means Premiere uses the GPU and everything is fine:
   
   
   
   
   However, if you see the red band with the words “This effect requires GPU acceleration”, then that means Premiere Pro is processing the effects using the CPU:
   
   
   
   
   Then it is a good idea to review the Premiere settings and effects (as described above) to see what is not letting Premiere use the GPU. To try identifying a specific problematic effect, you can drag the VR Color Gradients effect down the list of applied video effects. If the red error goes away when VR Color Gradients is at the bottom of the list, then the problem is in one of the effects above.
   
   
   
   If the red error does not go away anyway, then the problem is not in the effects but somewhere else (for example Mercury Engine is set to use the CPU instead of GPU).

Tests of render performance

Let’s make a few quick tests to see how the above GPU-related settings affect the render performance of Premiere. We will measure the export time (and then calculate the export speed in frames per second, FPS) of a simple test project with one clip with just one effect (Neat Video’s Reduce Noise v6) applied. We will do that in Premiere Pro 2025 on a system with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 running Windows. We will change the GPU-related settings of individual elements of the workflow and see how that affects the export speed.

As you can see in this table, enabling GPU in Mercury Engine, Premiere GPU interface in Neat Video and hardware acceleration of Premiere’s export codec (H.264 in this case) is clearly beneficial for the render speed, at least on this specific machine configuration. The hardware acceleration of Premiere’s import codec (H.264 as well) plays a smaller role on this computer and enabling does not make the render process faster.

On some computers, for example, ones with weaker GPU, the influence of these options on the render speed may be different: positive or negative, larger or smaller. This depends on the GPU hardware, drivers, settings, motherboard, amount of RAM, etc. All these factors take part in the overall performance. Usually, hardware acceleration improves the render speed, but there are exceptions too. Therefore, it is worth testing different configurations to find one that delivers the best render speed on a specific computer, especially when it has different GPU-related options.

Conclusion

Using GPU-based processing and hardware acceleration in Premiere is beneficial for both performance and visual consistency of results. The Neat Video 6 plug-in helps to keep Premiere‘s processing on GPU. However, attention is still required to ensure the rest of Premiere’s workflow (at least editing, preview, and rendering) uses GPU-based processing to avoid the negative impact of switching from GPU to CPU. This article offers several recommendations on how to achieve and control that.

Additional resources

• Premiere: system requirements (system memory, GPU memory)
• Premiere: GPU and driver requirements
• Neat Video 6: system requirements (system memory, GPU memory)
• Premiere: order of effect processing
• Premiere: red, yellow, and green render bars