Premiere Pro GPU acceleration broke because of latest AMD driver on RX 9070 XT
Just wanted to share this in case someone else runs into the same issue, because it wasted me a lot of time.
My setup:
- Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- RX 9070 XT
- 32GB RAM
- Windows 11
- Premiere Pro 2023 and 2026
- OBS recordings, mostly 1440p gameplay clips
A few days ago I updated my AMD driver to Adrenalin 26.5.1. After that, Premiere started acting weird.
At first I noticed some raw OBS clips had a red render bar on the timeline even though I didn’t add any effects, filters, scaling, or anything. These were just normal clips from the same match, but some were yellow and some were red.
Then I got this error when opening Premiere:
GPUSniffer.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close
After that, Premiere was stuck on:
Mercury Playback Engine Software Only
The renderer option was greyed out, so I couldn’t switch to GPU acceleration. Export times became much worse because Premiere wasn’t using GPU acceleration anymore.
I tried Premiere Pro 2026 too, thinking maybe Premiere 2023 was too old for the GPU, but it was even worse. I got:
A low-level exception occurred in: Adobe Player (Player:5)
In Premiere 2026, even Adobe sample media / old clips would sometimes show black preview with audio only. So at that point I knew it wasn’t an OBS issue or a corrupted clip.
I ran AMD Cleanup Utility in Safe Mode, removed the driver completely, and installed the latest AMD driver again, but GPUSniffer still crashed.
Then I tried rolling back to an older AMD driver. I downloaded Adrenalin 26.3.1 WHQL Recommended from the AMD previous drivers page for RX 9070 XT.
After installing 26.3.1 and restarting, I ran GPUSniffer again and it did not crash anymore.
Opened Premiere Pro 2026, checked:
File → Project Settings → General
and now it shows:
Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)
So for me, the fix was:
AMD Adrenalin 26.5.1 = GPUSniffer crash / Premiere stuck on Software Only
AMD Adrenalin 26.3.1 = fixed / GPU acceleration back
Posting this in case anyone with an RX 9070 XT or newer AMD GPU gets Premiere red timeline bars, black preview, Adobe Player low-level exception, or GPUSniffer crashing. Try rolling back the AMD driver before wasting hours changing Premiere settings.