CUDA, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro

A few weeks ago, I wrote a forum post to try to clarify some things about CUDA, the Mercury Playback Engine, and what it all means for Adobe Premiere Pro. I wrote this as a forum post because I wanted to invite questions and conversation. But, as forum threads do, it got a little messy, so I thought that I should consolidate the information here.

If you want to ask a question about this subject, please do so on the forum thread, not on this blog post. It’s very difficult to have a conversation in the comments of a blog post

What is the Mercury Playback Engine, and what is CUDA?

Mercury Playback Engine is a name for a large number of performance improvements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Those improvements include the following:
- 64-bit application
- multithreaded application
- processing of some things using CUDA
Everyone who has Premiere Pro CS5 has the first two of these. Only the third one depends on having a specific graphics card.

CUDA is a technology (architecture, programming language, etc.) for a certain kind of GPU processing. CUDA is an Nvidia technology, so only Nvidia cards provide it.

Confusingly—because of one of our own early videos that was unclear—a lot of people think that Mercury just refers to CUDA processing. This is wrong. To see that this was not the original intent, you need look no further than the project settings UI strings Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration and Mercury Playback Engine Software Only, which would make no sense if Mercury meant “hardware” (i.e., CUDA).

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