How to Unlock Adobe Premiere CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 to use almost any NVIDIA graphics card with CUDA acceleration

Studio 1 Productions by David Knarr

Starting with Adobe Premiere CS5, Adobe added the Mercury Playback Engine (MPE). The Mercury Playback Engine can use an NVidia video card’s GPU to accelerate playback, effects and rendering.

However, Adobe has only “certified” a few video cards from NVIDIA. (See Note 1, About Adobe's Certified Video Cards). According to Adobe, they only certify video cards that have gone through rigorous testing by Adobe, which takes a lot of time. With all of the different video cards using the NVidia chipset and the variations of these video cards from the various manufacturers, it's easy to understand why Adobe doesn't certify more video cards.

If you don't have a certified card or you want to use a non-certified NVidia video card, there is a way to edit a file and add your video card to a list, so Adobe Premiere CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 will allow your video card to run with GPU Acceleration. Some people call this a mod, hacking or unlocking the video cards, whatever you choose to call it, this will not make it "certified" in the eyes of Adobe. But, you will be able to use the GPU Acceleration feature of Adobe Premiere CS6, CS5.5 and Premiere CS5.

There are thousand and thousands of Adobe Premiere CS6, CS5.5 and CS5 users who are using non-certified NVidia video cards without any problems. In fact, we have 8 systems running non-certified video cards without any problems.

This article will show you how to "unlock" Adobe Premiere CS6, CS5.5 and CS5 to use almost any NVidia video card with GPU Acceleration in Premiere CS5 and above. There are two methods covered in this article, one is by using a small program I wrote, the other is by doing it manually.

Note for Laptop Owners: On some Laptops models, you may not be able to use the GPU Acceleration with Premiere CS5, CS5.5 or CS6. Please make sure you read the section on page 2 marked Special Note for Laptop Owners.

This article covers a lot of information, not just how to unlock the video. It coves topics such as the video card requirements for the unlock to work, how to setup Premiere for GPU Acceleration, I show some benchmark results, talk about power supply requirements, video card cooling, how to do the unlock and more. Please read the article in it's entirety. read more...