Matt’s right. What you are selecting there is the transformative hardware acceleration processor for real-time playback, ie “Hardware Mercury Playback” of all video FX/Transformations in Premiere that are coded to be hardware accelerated & have a hardware acceleration badge next to them in the video fx/transitions bins. The d-GPU is best suited for the task with much more muscle & it’s own faster memory. If you think your performance doesn’t suffer asking the intel iGPU to do the hardware decoding and then the Hardware Mercury Playback on top of that, leeching system memory to your iGPU (You better have lots of RAM) instead of a modern RTX card with a jillion CUDA processors…, well more power to you & your hulked-out iGPU. But I have never read anyone else saying that intel OpenCL provides a tangibly sharper image when used for hardware acceleration in Premiere. Adobe defaults to Nvidia for Hardware Mercury Playback and Nvenc encoding for exports for a reason. If you have an intel iGPU+ Nvidia, Quick sync will decode the AVC/HVEC material and create a readily editable i-frame video stream, at the same time the Nvidia CUDA technology does all the Hardware Mercury Playback of transformed video frames, like lumetri color, scaling, motion, titles, ultra-key, blending modes, some blur fx, etc – any effect with hardware acceleration badge. And Premiere, unmolested, will use use all 3 technologies, 1) Quick Sync Hardware decode 2) CUDA Hardware FX/Transformations 3) Nvenc AVC/HVEC hardware encoding, to give you crazy good performance with a properly configured system.

I’m sure You know what works for you, just saying that your solution/results seem against the grain.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/63bace65cf59c30911761d0ef38fb5c1a4c129ded627767b11281328d8aaa67a.jpg

When changing MPE between Intel iGpu and Nvidia Gpu, there is noticeable difference when you compare the results by side in Photoshop where you visually analyze the image. Intel iGpu OpenCL wins here but it takes longer to encode.
From a quality perspective when compared to H264 software encoding x264, 2pass very slow preset neider neither gpu encoding can keep up,
Intel Quick Sync and Nvidia Nvenc. H264 X264 software encoding comes first in the line, H264 hardware encoding Intel Open CL comes second and H264 hardware encoding Nvidia Cuda, comes third place.
Premiere CC internal H264 software encoding with 2 pass provides good quality, maybe even better then gpu hardware encoding H264/H265 but stil loses to X264 software encoding very slow preset 2pass.

Testing done on Intel Core I9 12900k, with Nvidia RTX 2070, bitrate 12mbps for 1080 and 40 mbps for 4k. Footage 4k 150mbps H264 50p 4.2.0 8 bit, lut Fuji ETERNA 250D Kodak 2395 (by Adobe).

If you can implement and test this it would be much appreciated from many users.
Intel Pro Arc 40/50 seems promising. It comes with AV1 hardware encoding and the quality is similar with H264 X264 software encoding very slow preset 2pass. This will be the first time hardware encoding reaching this level of quality.
AV1 CPU software encoding surpases H264 X264 software encoding very slow preset 2pass, with longer encoding times.

Changing MPE will change the image slightly, but it shouldn’t be because of the encoding, but rather because of any effects (Lumetri color, LUTs, blurs, etc.) will be slightly different. It could be affecting the underlying footage a little bit as well, but I wouldn’t think it would be much. Probably depends on the footage itself and the entire graphics pipeline.

The Voukoder plugin is terrific! We try to keep to the base version of Premiere Pro, however, in order to make the results applicable to everyone. We also make our benchmarks freely available for anyone to download, and requiring additional plugins makes things a lot more complex.

Maybe you are right but from my tests when encoding with MPE set to Intel Open CL the encoding image is sharper if compared to Nvidia Cuda. Even the rendering time is different.
So you are telling that when Intel GPU and Nvidia Gpu is present in the system you can not use hardware encode video in Premirere CC with Intel Quick sync technology and it defaults to Nvidia NVENC? Maybe try http://www.voukoder plugin, then you can choose your prefered encoding hardware.

That setting is for what device/engine to use for the Mercury Playback Engine, which is used to process GPU accelerated effects – it doesn’t impact hardware decoding or encoding. Adobe has a great guide on what is affected by MPE here: https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/gpu-acceleration-and-hardware-encoding.html

Encoding and decoding settings are set in Edit->Preferences->Media to enable/disable decoding by device type (Intel/NVIDIA/AMD), and to enable/disable encoding completely (no option for selecting which device type).

In fact, I just noticed that the new Export UI in Premiere Pro 22.3 actually tells you what it will be using for the hardware encoder if you hover over it (see screenshots). My system has both Intel iGPU and NVIDIA, but no matter what you change, NVIDIA is what is used for hardware encoding. Even double-checked changing the MPE settings as you suggested just in case it was some sort of undocumented aspect of MPE, but still defaults to using NVIDIA NVENC.

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Would be glad for clarification:

– HEVC decoding could be fixed soon and it might change the picture, if I understand correctly? Or, anyway the IQS is much faster?
– These tests were run with iGPU only, right? If I use dGPU does Intel CPU offer any advantage?

Thanks

These tests are using both the iGPU (at least for Intel since it is broken on AMD right now) and the NVIDIA GPU. Premiere Pro picks which is better for the given task, and it does a pretty good job. In terms of straight performance, Quick Sync (Intel iGPU) tends to be slightly faster, but it often comes down to the exact media you are using, bitrate, resolution, and number of streams. But, capability is another matter entirely. Different devices have support for various “flavors” of HEVC, and for Premiere Pro, the big one you only get from Intel right now is HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit. We have a nice chart for this here: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/What-H-264-and-H-265-Hardware-Decoding-is-Supported-in-Premiere-Pro-2120/

And just to note, Premiere Pro is fairly light in terms of what types of HEVC is supports hardware decoding for. If you look at something like DaVinci Resolve, Intel gets you way more in the way of support: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/What-H-264-and-H-265-Hardware-Decoding-is-Supported-in-DaVinci-Resolve-Studio-2122/

HEVC decoding getting fixed on the AMD iGPU could change things, but it is pretty much impossible to know for sure until said fixes come. Performance will likely be very similar to Quick Sync or NVIDIA, but we suspect that the supported “flavors” will be very similar to the AMD Radeon 6000 GPUs. If that is the case, Intel will still have a firm value add over AMD, but again, impossible to know until we can see it actually working.

One annoying thing with Premiere Pro is that you can’t actually specify what hardware encoder to use when exporting. If you have an NVIDIA GPU and Intel Quick Sync, I believe it defaults to using the GPU’s encoder first. So, if you have an iGPU and a dGPU, it would be using the iGPU for decoding, and the dGPU for encoding (assuming both have support for the source/destination codec). That is one thing I like about DaVinci Resolve, you can specify the exact encoder to use when exporting (Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD).

Sure you can, if you have Intel Core I9 12900k and an Nvidia Gpu when you export with hardware encoding it defaults to Nvidia Gpu.
But if you want it to encode with iGpu then you go to File-Project Settings-General-Video Rendering And Playback – Intel OpenCL. Then when you export look in task manager, the iGPU is max out with low usage on Nvidia Gpu.

I can see that dilemma. For what it’s worth, I’m on the side of thinking it’s totally fair to get the points for being able to accellerate a common codec (like you say more and more cameras are using it) – it’s a real world benefit to many users and should incentivise the other players to improve their hardware support.

It seems Adobe are working on the MXF wrapper for Windows (see my post on the beta: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-beta-bugs/beta-23-0-very-high-cpu-use-for-threadripper-3960x-playback-fails/idc-p/13181211#M240 ) which isn’t yet working at all for me – it was making the CPU go crazy, now it just crashes out, but I’m glad they’re working on it, that’s what the Beta is all about.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ It is really completely unknown until the drivers get fixed and the decoding/encoding capabilities can be tested. The big thing is going to be what variations of HEVC the AMD iGPU supports. Quick Sync pretty much supports any variation of HEVC you can imagine on a hardware level, so that is the big thing we are hoping to see from AMD’s iGPU. If it is just HEVC 8/10bit 4:2:0, that is really no different than what you can get from any AMD/NVIDIA dGPU, so not much on the way of increased capability. It would let you split the decoding and encoding across two devices for a small boost to export performance (if using a source and destination that can be hardware accelerated), but generally that isn’t as big of a deal as having more capable hardware decoding support.

Performance-wise, I doubt we are going to see anything game changing. Decoding is almost always already at the “good enough” level, so even if they make it faster, it likely won’t affect overall performance in most cases since something else is likely to become a bottleneck first.

As for the dGPU not being active during editing, it depends on what is going on. If it is just straight decoding, then the iGPU would probably take on that load and the decoder on the dGPU would be idle. The dGPU still has to do things like process any GPU accelerated effects (Lumetri, blurs, etc), however, so it rarely will be fully idle, just the decoder portion.

One annoying thing with Premiere Pro is that you can’t actually specify what hardware encoder to use when exporting. If you have an NVIDIA GPU and Intel Quick Sync, I believe it defaults to using the GPU’s encoder first. So, if you have an iGPU and a dGPU, it would be using the iGPU for decoding, and the dGPU for encoding (assuming both have support for the source/destination codec). That is one thing I like about DaVinci Resolve, you can specify the exact encoder to use when exporting (Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD).