Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 – How To Enable CUDA GPU Acceleration After Nvidia Driver Update – May 2022

About a week ago, I noticed that my Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 video editing program was no longer using my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU (graphics card) when working on a video project.

The “Project Settings” dialog box under the “General” tab said “Mercury Playback Engine SOFTWARE ONLY” on the “Video Rendering and Playback” section.

The “Renderer” drop down menu was grayed out (or greyed out for our UK friends). With no way to choose “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)” like I could just a week or two ago.

It must have been a problem caused by the latest NVIDIA Studio Drivers update that I recently installed.

I tried opening an old project that I know used GPU CUDA acceleration and it gave me the error message “This project was last used with Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA), which is not available on this system. Mercury Playback Engine Software Only will be used.” ??

I spent hours searching the internet for possible solutions including on the Adobe community support forum, Reddit, YouTube and various other forums.

There were lots of mentions of the “cuda_supported_cards.txt” file. So I checked that file and sure enough my GPU was listed in the text file as GeForce GTX 1070 as it should be. This has worked great for years.

Another person mentioned checking “GPUSniffer.exe” to get your video card’s name and then enter it into the “cuda_supported_cards.txt” file.

I opened a CMD.exe DOS prompt and ran GPUSniffer.exe in the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 folder.

My video card was listed as “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070” NOT just “GeForce GTX 1070”.

So Nvidia must have changed the name of the GPU in the latest driver release to include the brand name “NVIDIA” before the model name.

GPUSniffer.exe said that my video card was “NOT CHOSEN BECAUSE IT DID NOT MATCH THE NAMED LIST OF CARDS”.

I changed the user permissions on the cuda_supported_cards.txt list file so that I could edit it.

Then I added the exact same name of my GPU as shown in GPUSniffer.exe which is “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070”.

I opened Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 again and CUDA acceleration was once again turned on!!!

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This fix might work for any person that owns an Nvidia GTX series graphics card.

I imagine they updated the “name” to include the “NVIDIA” brand for every card with the new Studio Ready Drivers.

Here’s a partial list of GPU cards that might be affected by this driver “name” change – GeForce GTX 480 GeForce GTX 550 Ti GeForce GTX 550 GeForce GTX 555 GeForce GTX 560 Ti GeForce GTX 560 GeForce GTX 570 GeForce GTX 580 GeForce GTX 590 GeForce GTX 650 GeForce GTX 650 Ti GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost GeForce GTX 660 GeForce GTX 660 Ti GeForce GTX 670 GeForce GTX 680 GeForce GTX 690 GeForce GTX 750 GeForce GTX 750 Ti GeForce GTX 760 GeForce GTX 760 192-bit GeForce GTX 760 (192-bit) GeForce GTX 760 Ti GeForce GTX 770 GeForce GTX 780 GeForce GTX 780 Ti GeForce GTX 950 GeForce GTX 960 GeForce GTX 970 GeForce GTX 980 GeForce GTX 980 Ti GeForce GTX 1050 GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GeForce GTX 1060 GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GeForce GTX 1070 GeForce GTX 1070 Ti GeForce GTX 1080 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GeForce GTX 460M GeForce GTX 470M GeForce GTX 480M GeForce GTX 485M GeForce GTX 560M GeForce GTX 570M GeForce GTX 580M GeForce GTX 660M GeForce GTX 670M GeForce GTX 675M GeForce GTX 680M GeForce GTX 670MX GeForce GTX 675MX GeForce GTX 680MX GeForce GTX 760M GeForce GTX 765M GeForce GTX 770M GeForce GTX 780M GeForce GTX 850M GeForce GTX 860M GeForce GTX 870M GeForce GTX 880M GeForce GTX 950M GeForce GTX 960M GeForce GTX 965M GeForce GTX 970M GeForce GTX 980M GeForce GTX 280m GeForce GTX 285m GeForce GTX 460m GeForce GTX 470m GeForce GTX 480m GeForce GTX 485m GeForce GTX 560m GeForce GTX 570m GeForce GTX 580m