Issue with GTX570, Epic R3D, Mercury "hardware does not meet minimum specifications"

[Sami Sinervä]

Issue with GTX570, Epic R3D, Mercury "hardware does not meet minimum specifications"

Hi

Sort of starting to become desperate, and I am curios about what kind of setups other RED users are running, experiences and if you've ran into the same kind of errors as I have done.

So, I finally decided to go from my 2 year old iMac to build a completely new PC to edit R3D raw on from my Epic. I went to the store yesterday and bought a decent machine (at least I think so), that I want to be able to upgrade further ahead.

Anyway, I have this 4 minute music video project shot at 5K, edited in a 2K 16:9 sequence in Premiere CS 5.5 (updated to the latest version from Adobe today).

To start with, I get no help from the GPU when just doing a regular playback of the RED files. Maybe that's how it should be - I don't know - but I thought the GPU accelerated Mercury engine was supposed to get some kind of boost for playback. Right now, it does not matter if I play it back with or without the GPU acceleration.

The big issue is though that as every time I do a preview render in Premiere, it crashes sooner or later, and I get the following message:
OpenGL message "hardware does not meet minimum specifications"
Your hardware configuration does not meet minimum specifications needed to run the application. The application must close.

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3008

I found this thread in the Adobe forums where someone else seemed to have had the same issue: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4122796

This also applies to trying to do an export: If I export in Premiere, I get the same error or I queue it up and run it through Media Encoder it just locks up/crashes.

The thing is, this has forced me to do a Mercury software render of the music video project and it takes ages. Actually, I think it takes longer than on my old iMac, which I just feel is insane. Have I wasted my money on this new gear or is there something wrong with my setup, or maybe my graphics card? When I playback my timeline with the 5K content, it seems just slightly better than on my iMac which is 2 years old (an i7 2.8Ghz with 12GB internal memory).

5 hour render of a 4 minute 2K sequence, with 5K material, exporting to 1080p H264 MP4, does that seem reasonable?

This is my set-up:
ASUS P9X79 mb
Intel Core i7-3820
Corsair Dominator GT Quad 16GB DDR3 PC3-17000 2133MHz
MSI GeForce N570GTX 1280MB
OCZ SSD 240GB Agility 3 Series SATA III
Seagate Barracuda 2TB (64MB / 7200RPM)

I am running the latest drivers and firmware for motherboard bios and graphics card on Windows 7 Ultimate.

Feeling quite frustrated considering the huge chunk of money spent on something that seems like a waste...

 

[Les C.]

This link might help you: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Ah, replied too soon, you've got a 570.

For the 'OpenGL message "hardware does not meet minimum specifications" , maybe it doesn't like your drivers - have you tried later ones?

I've got a GTX-580, and it works fine, so your card should also.

BTW - you have to choose the Mercury in one of the option boxes. It should accelerate after you've done that.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

What drivers are you using? There are issues with 301.xx which were designed for Kepler and hastily backported for older cards. Try rolling back to 295.xx or 296.xx.

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Thanks for the feedback!

I am running version 296.10 of the drivers already. Gonna try change them to older and even the beta to see what happens.

Yes, I've had the Mercury GPU acceleration checked in in the project settings.

I am sort of in chock this morning. Before I went to bed last night I set my iMac (i7 2.8Ghz, 12GB 1067 Mhz internal memory, external firewire 800 drive) to render the exact same Premiere sequence as my PC. Like I said, the iMac is 2 years old. And it took the Imac 3 hours and 11 min to render, while the it took my PC 3 hours and 35 min to render.

How can this be possible?? Even though both were in Mercury software mode my I think my new PC should be a lot faster. I feel this is a huge disapointment... Though, I've seen similar posts like this before: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/879666 where it says that PC should be a faster platform for Premiere/AE.

Edit: Btw, I'd like to add that on my iMac Adobe Media Encoder easily uses most of the internal memory available. On my PC, it just nudges 4GB and then goes back again. Why isn't it using more memory to make the job faster? I've even dedicated 12GB to Adobe software in the preferences.

 

[Jaakko Rinne]

To start with, I get no help from the GPU when just doing a regular playback of the RED files. Maybe that's how it should be - I don't know - but I thought the GPU accelerated Mercury engine was supposed to get some kind of boost for playback. Right now, it does not matter if I play it back with or without the GPU acceleration.

You need a Rocket card to get a playback boost for R3D files. If the decompression and debayer of the R3Ds is your bottleneck, then it doesn't really matter if you've got GPU acceleration down the line.

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Thanks Jaakko. I am gonna get the Rocket card down the line. But... currently I don't get the graphics card to work at all, so the test between my iMac and PC are both in software mode, i.e. only CPU. I still think a render with Adobe Media Encoder should go faster with my new PC since there is more raw horsepower under the hood.

 

[Sami Sinervä]

An update: Well, I guess my iMac was sort of top end back when I bought it. Checked up some performance tests online between my PCs CPU and the iMacs and the difference is tiny. Guess I should have spent a bit more money, but I'll save that up for the Red Rocket instead.

If I only could solve the problem with the graphics card now...

 

[Sami Sinervä]

So if anyone else runs into this problem, I found this thread on Adobe's forum: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3768127

This seems to be an issue with GPU rendering and content of high resolution. So Adobe's bragging about dealing 5K well, just seems like bragging this far.

 

[Patrick OMara]

If you are going pumping massive RED footage with effects you should probably look at getting a quadro card that has more memory(6GB) as opposed to the (1.2GB) your card has... If you still have doubts or other expectations that are not met, send adobe a support ticket.

No need to diss Adobe on a public forum when you don't know the root cause yet.

 

[Patrick OMara]

If you want to have better playback try these(you may already know):

1) Project window > right click footage clip > select source settings > in the new window that pops up change debayer detail to low > click okay
2) Right Click on your program window > select playback resolution > set to 1/4
3) Right Click on your program window > select paused resolution > set to 1/4 (or 1/2)
4) On your sequence timeline, any clip without accelerated plugins will show a red line along the top of the window. See if there is a plugin that can do roughly the same thing but gpu accelerated. To show only effects that are accelerated click the (speedy arrow) button to filter the plugins. Once applied the red line that shows up will be yellow instead.
5) Make sure your scratch disks, project, footage, and where you save is all ssd.
6) Your video card is probably running out of ram(as stated before).

to get playback of red footage at full res, you'd need a red rocket, or more cpus, and definetly a video card with more ram for gpu effects. Depending on how many streams of footage at once, you might even need faster ssds.


Red footage is a beast.

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Thanks for the feedback! No disrespect to Adobe but this obviously is an issue where the graphics card hits the wall because of too much data, and something Premiere should deal with (or maybe Nvidia, if it is about bad drivers, but I doubt that is the issue).

The playback works fine at 1/4 resolution but as soon as I try any type of GPU rendering it crashes Premiere sooner or later.

I am installing a new SSD for the OS tomorrow on a SATA2 disc, and I will be using my current OS SSD, which is SATA3, as a scratch disc instead. I will also be upgrading my graphics card next week into a 580GTX with 3GB memory, which I hope will deal with things a bit better. Can't afford a Quaddro with 6GB memory at the moment, and the GTX cards give so much more CUDA cores in the same price range. I'll probably add another 16GB ram too.

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

So if anyone else runs into this problem, I found this thread on Adobe's forum: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3768127

This seems to be an issue with GPU rendering and content of high resolution. So Adobe's bragging about dealing 5K well, just seems like bragging this far.

Funny, my home-built PC does just fine with it.

Don't blame Adobe on poor .r3d playback if you don't buy an adequate system.

 

[Brad Allen]

Hi Sami,

Sorry I haven't posted any earlier - what you are seeing definitely isn't normal for a GTX570. I'm running the same card and can definitely say that I don't get crashes every time I try and render etc.

Also ran some tests for you. Exporting out a 4min 2k sequence with 4k footage only took around an hour on my system as opposed to 4hrs on yours. Also when using a 4k sequence and exporting out to 1080 with "Max render Quality" unchecked, it was only about a 25min export.

It definitely seems like something is wrong with the graphics card though based on your error messages - though I don't think it's a problem with the 570 line in general.

I'll be interested to find out how the 580 goes. Out of interest, have you tried stressing the GTX570 out with any games, benchmarks etc? Wondering if you have a dodgy card?

 

[Sami Sinervä]

Today I went and switched the 570 GTX 1.2GB to a 580 GTX 3GB, and everything works like a dream!

Brad: Yeah, I guess there must have been something spooky with the card. The thing is, I also tested my Premiere project on a friend's PC, which had a 560 GTX 1GB card, and got the same error there.

Matt: I still don't think software should crash, even if you have a poor system. Now, I don't know, maybe there was something else wrong with the graphics card, but I am not the only one who has had the issue.

Anyway, problem solved for me so I am very happy now! Also, placed an order for Adobe CS6 yesterday.