Blackmagic Davinci Resolve CPU vs GPU Rendering 

For davinci resolve, by default if there is only one GPU detected, it will not use full GPU acceleration unless you specifically enable it. It does this to avoid stutters on the main display. while it is rendering. When a videocard needs to use shared memory, you are essentially dropping from 300-400GB/s throughput to around 30GB/s for any working data that spills over to the system memory. For proper acceleration, you need at least 12GB of VRAM for 4K, and will also need to ensure that full acceleration is used, especially for visual effects.

One thing I've discovered is how much better 4K video on RU-vid looks on a 1080p monitor than 1080p feed on the same display. I always assumed it would make no difference but it's massive due to the amount of compression you get with 1080p, especially on 1080p versions of videos uploaded in 4K.

Hey Dave, why don't you try inviting someone from DaVinci to explain all those settings? That would make an awesome video/colab

FYI, the 2060 is not the fastest video encoder. The best trick is to buy a $120 Intel A380 and add it to your existing system. It encodes h.264, h.265, and AV1 like a bandit. WAY faster than a 2060, for $120. Not much good for anything else though.

If you set "network optimization" to ON then YT can start encoding your upload as soon as it starts... rather than having to wait until the entire upload is completed.

The thing with "pure GPU" encoding (NVENC for example) is: You won't get the same quality per MB/s in the file. The NVENC encoder is just less efficient than X264/X265 on the CPU. This is because NVENC is made for streaming and for "good enough" quality with low system overhead for live content basically. If you have the CPU resources free, it's generally always better to go with CPU encoding, since you could also do multi pass encoding and other tricks to get the best quality in the smallest bitrate. That's at least my latest info on that subject.

Hi Dave. Improving encoding times can be a real pain when dealing with multiple resolutions and bit rates within the same project. I found that sometimes setting a higher Bitrate for the finished product made encoding faster, but with the larger final file size. There are a lot of tweaks you can do with the GPU encoder, Resolve gives you a lot of settings, but it will take time to dial them in and see which is best. I have it running on a 1660 Super also with 6gb of VRAM. No playback issues,no proxies. Just local SSDs and a surprisingly fast 5400rpm 4tb Seagate HDD.

Very interesting. I moved from Openshot (opensource and free) to Resolve (just free) just recently. In Openshot I had access to GPU rendering, while in Resolve I was pondering if there's any gain for me to get the "Pro" for the GPU rendering, this video came at the perfect time. My rendering rig is an old-ish Dell Precision with an even older Nvidia GPU, but crucially maybe a pretty old Skylake laptop CPU and just like you, I edit then I click render and it takes however long it takes. On this laptop, moving from software/CPU to GPU NVENC in Openshot did reduce rendering times for x264/high 1080p from around real-time to less than half real-time. The CPU is however an old quad core and power limited to 45W, while your CPU has 3x the cores and of a newer architecture, could be that your CPU is just so fast the GPU doesn't make a difference. My feeling is the GPU memory is not an issue if the GPU has been loaded to 100%, if it had to wait for memory you'd have seen lower GPU load.

Have you tried using the other encoders rather than custom? I'm fairly sure the youtube one and Masters both encode using the gpu for the free version.

Karnaugh Mapping?! I remember learning about that in Tech School in 1973. It was fun, I could understand it, but I couldn't see much practical use for it, but you're demonstrating it in your screenshot sequences. Hmm, it still must be a thing these days for digital circuit design engineers. Thanks for the video!

Make sure you have resizable bar enabled in the bios, only a slight improvement though

Is CPU or GPU better for davecad though?

One of the other Daves (Dave Lovett - Usagi Electric) uses full version of DaVinci Resolve, IIRC. That's a quick renderer indeed... Nice showcasing of the software.

I just bought one of those last week! Still trying to figure it out. PLEASE do a tutorial! I'll watch it a dozen times.

Interesting and a bit surprising. I have an older PC with a quad core CPU and Nvidia GTX 1070. When I switched from software encoding to GPU (nvenc) I saw a huge reduction in encoding time. I didn't measure it, but it was several times faster. I guess it depends a lot on how many CPU cores you have.

Dave. Like you, I also don't really care how long rendering takes. The reason I would like to get the Studio version is because of the codecs. I also use Handbrake in my workflow for transcoding but apparently you don't need to do it with Studio as it has lots more codecs including ProRes. I also don't need all the amazing equipment control, etc.

Just bought the speed editor specifically because it costs £340 and comes with the £240 software so I can finally use GPU rendering. Speed boosts all around with the new keyboard too, so I cant wait for it to arrive. Didn't expect an EEVBlog video though when looking for a performance comparison! Great video, thanks.

To improve smooth editing generate proxy files first. You can do so by right clicking on the clip in the most left tab. The default proxy settings are kind of insane disk space wise, you can lower that down to a lower quality one but don't use H264/5 those are not well suited for real-time decoding and cutting in and out, as you are noticing during editing. With a proxy clip it's smooth as butter. I used to used Vegas Pro too but it just couldn't handle my 4k60, DaVinci is such an improvement like 10 fold and almost no crashes anymore (compared to 50 per project in Vegas and sometimes taking days to render parts of the file and join them again because Vegas would just keep shitting itself....) But yeah DaVinci is nice, and with a bit of tweaking that rig you have should allow you to edit 4k just fine (make proxies) and rendering as you said isn't your priority or get a new GPU for that.

I also have moved to Resolve from Vegas, though on a Mac Studio and it just flies on 4k footage. Likely due to the Apple Silicon having dedicated encoders. But the best part of Resolve vs Vegas is the stability. No more endless crashes.

I have a Ryzen 5900X and a RTX 3060. I use my ryzen 1 generation Asus Prime B350 Plus with the BIOS update. I am really happy with my computer. I found I was getting overheat using just a fan and crashes, but I altered the Precision Boost so it clips the max boost frequency to the one in the specs (4.8ghz), as well I altered the max wattage to 105 watts. I get the pretty much specified performance and the heat is ok and the system runs great. To my knowledge the 3060 was the lowest card to support resizable bar, so I did the built in windows legacy to efi converter and run it now that way. I just did a blender test and I got cpu 2 min 47 sec vs 36 sec with GPU, 27 sec with cpu as cudu device with gpu. This is potentially not an equivalent work type though. One time I went to 'autotune' out of desperation and it tried to up the base frequency of the cpu and when it went into 100% load the system just restarted. I hope it didn't hurt anything but it is working fine. I set the thermal throttle limit to 78C which under certain loads it gets to, but actually under 100% blender load it is a bit lower than that like 74C. The CPU and GPU I got on sale using extra restaurant tips last summer. They were both around 450 CDN dollars before tax. I got an openbox Gigabyte Eagle OC 3060 and I don't overclock it and it never goes above 70C.

I remember the old days you never edited your videos wow how things have changed lol great videos.

Well this has convinced me not to upgrade, so you've saved me £245. My CPU is a 5900x and sometimes when editing the timeline it can feel a little choppy, even ay 1080p 30fps. Someone mentioned about generating proxy media, so I tried that and it works like a dream now. Thanks for the video. I don't mind waitng a few extra minutes for the video to render.

I've never understood your reason for using handbrake for transcoding. Seems like an extra step for no reason...

Black not back (title and description) :)

Leaving your comments aside, the 3000 and 4000 series have a much improved NVENC and NVDEC blocks, which are faster and have much better quality at the same bitrate compared to 2000 series GPUs(there's a comparison table in wikipedia iirc). Now i'm very curious to see this same test repeated across a 3000 GPU, maybe some company will send you one? ;). Also, you were looking at "shared memory" which means nothing really, the gpu memory usage is the one to look for, and it won't make any difference for video editing

Your actual encoder settings were still set to high quality tuning.

it's very interesting to see how resolve chooses to use GPU or CPU to decode some files. The thing I don't understand is why can't it use CPU and GPU at the same time, you can see the GPU at 100% and the CPU is at 10% all that processing speed sitting unused.

GPU rendering, as in calculating effetcs, actually included in free version. Not using the youtube preset will give you more options. Also opening the advance settings will allow you to for example "bypass reencode when possible" which really speeds things up, as it doesnt need to decode and then encode again. Also the quality high/low/best isn't that usefull. Rather restrict it to a bitrate you set by hand. Having studio will give you plenty of other new features, and rhe edit page performance should be mich great. Even generating thumbnails for the timeline tracks...

I reckon Blackmagic are missing a trick here. That editor and their keyboard could so easily with a bit of software be usable as a photoshop editor too. Yes, I know Adobe are a competitor, but this could open the door to a lot of customers. Same for Affinity Photo, capture one etc. I use photoshop for images, and DaVinci for video. Photoshop users often pay just this much for a dedicated editor keyboard. If they get Davinci thrown in it may quickly turn them away from Adobe’s video editing tools.

Speed of the GPU doesn't matter for Video En/De-Coding, it's done by the NVENC-Part of the GPU which was introduced in 2012 and got some new features like HEVC and lastly AV1-Encoder, but in essence for the same settings the generation of NVidia-Card doesn't matter, the speed doesn't change.

The stutter you have when editting in the playback screen it's because of mechanical hard drives on the nas, it is NOT the network, i tested ALL of it because it makes me crazy when i'm editing that quite often the screen freezes and the audio keeps going. i tried to copy the soruce files to a local WD BLACK on the editing machine and made no difference, the real difference was having all in the NVME and edit from there, wow, it blowed my mind, the difference was astronomical, so if you want speed, have all the source on nvme drives, the destination doesn't matter, any hdd nas will do.

Might be good to get hold of a 40 series nvidia card so you can get AV1 encoding 😊 it’s 25% better quality for the same file size

@00:34 ... That's what she said. :)

68C seems a bit too warm. Does your GPU rate limit when it overheats?

If you could figure out "feel-a-vision" you would revolutionize a parallel video industry.

i'm moving up the gfx card world, finally got a 1080.....

No use comparing different encoding implementations. The algorithm is different, the result is different. I can make ffmpeg encode ten times faster or ten times slower than a gpu, it depends on how much motion search I want.

There's a few things that explain why there wasn't much difference there. I think the main point is just basically that you have a very nice CPU Dave, but your GPU while being no slouch, it also isn't anything extraordinary. nVidia 20xx is already 2 generations behind, and the xx60 class is one step above budget class - it's in the very bottom of mid range. Still better than my 1660TI, but you know. There's also the fact that you are basically not using the PC for anything else, which lets DaVinci max out CPU usage for rendering. It's like, these days, the difference between basic rendering tasks between CPU and GPU are not a huge gap like it was in the past... with multithreading and CPUs with 12 cores, CPU rendering has become much faster than it was in the past. Or rather, it depends on what your project has. For instance, if you had a ton of 3D scenes, multi-cam, tons upon tons of layers, transitions and effects, text overlays and all that jazz... then perhaps you'd see a bigger difference there. But basic cuts and few layers, you won't get much of a difference. That or say, if you were using the PC for something else during the render process. And then, I think there are some tweaks and changes in configuration to optimize GPU usage, but I'm not too familiar. That's more or less it.

Someone send Dave a graphics card with 48G of RAM 🙂

Chome uses some GPU Memory, you'll have more free if you close it probably. Also, as you mentioned you do have a beast of a CPU, that may be part of why it's not much of an improvement.

my i7-9700k & 2080's watercooled beats most new gpus :) cost a bit in 2019 but never need to upgrade bit like the people who bought the 1080ti's big performance beyound 2023

You need a better GPU obviously. If you GPU and CPU are on a performance par then it won't help that much really. A 2070 super is a good price/performance GPU card. 4090 is the latest and I tend to find it doesn't get fully utilised by apps.

Everybody is leaving Vegas for Resolve

I'm rendering as I watch this video. Renderception.

Black to the Future. Black to front, ???

Get a RTX 4090.

It would be much better with a better card. 2060 is crap