Mercury Playback and the 27" iMac

I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 almost exclusively these days. I use it on a 27" iMac with a AMD HD 6790 video card. I've hacked it to work with OpenCL and Mercury Playback.

This is unsupported by Adobe.

Update

Many of you have asked, "Which video cards should be supported?"

The true answer is, anything which properly runs OpenCL on OS X Lion. There are dozens of AMD, ATI and NVIDIA cards which should work.

Howto

Here's how (if you like pictures and words):

Elite Howto

Here's how (if you are elite):

• Quit Premiere Pro CS6
• Open terminal
• Type:

  sudo vi "/Applications/Adobe\ Premiere\ Pro\ CS6/Adobe\ Premiere\ Pro\ CS6.app/Contents/opencl_supported_cards.txt"

  SHIFT+G  -- go to bottom of file
  a        -- add a line
  ATI Radeon HD 6970M  <-- this is the line to add

  ESC      -- back to view mode in vim
  :wq      -- to write and quit

• Open Premiere Pro CS6
• Project->Project Settings->General and change the Renderer to OpenCL+GPU instead of Software only.

Comments

[Andrew Stone]

Do you know if anyone has successfully done this text file hack on the slightly older but common ATI 5770 card that works with DaVinci Resolve?

-Andrew Stone

[Travis]

This doesn't cause any heat issues with the card?

[John V]

Thanks for the info. I did the same for my GeForce GTX 560 card.. using the cuda_supported_cards.txt file.

Also what microphone did you use to record your voice... sounds excellent ... very clean!

[John V]

Andrew,
Give your ATI 5770 card a try...
There are many video cards that are not officially supported by Adobe but will work with Premiere Pro. Adobe doesn't want to test every card and support many cards though their tech support. On the nVidia side... many cards over 750Mb are supported. My old 8800GT with 516Mb would not work with the hack.

[Andrew Stone]

Thanks John. Yes, I have the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 1 GB of RAM and it does work. It works well although quite a noisy card.

I will take your advice and just give it a shot. Appreciate the reply.

-Andrew Stone

[adrian]

Are you getting a comparable performance boost to an NVIDA card with CUDA cores? Is this actually hardware accelerated playback, or is it still software playback? have you compared this to an NVIDA card by any chance? did you do any benchmarks?

Sorry for all the questions! thanks for the hack btw!