Upgrade RAM or buy a PC?

I have a laptop that has GTX 965M with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB of system memory. It stutters while I edit 4K 100Mbps videos. Will upgrading the RAM to 16GB stop the stuttering, or do I need to get a PC? I use the free version of Davinci Resolve if that matters.

Time to replace the system. That GPU will absolutely not keep up at 4K.

Time to replace the system. That GPU will absolutely not keep up at 4K.

Well, that sucks. It costs too much to replace this laptop for my use.

Go into the Task Manager's performance area and you can see how much RAM you are using. If it's maxed, then you will probably be helped with more RAM. You can also create optimized media in Resolve and/or lower the timeline resolution. Those choices alone can enable you to edit on underpowered machines.

Hope that helps.

The GPU is the deciding factor with Resolve, though. You could have 46 terabytes of RAM (theoretically!) and it wouldn't help you if your GPU is underpowered, which is your case. This is the big difference between Resolve and other NLEs: image processing is handled by the GPU. See the Configuration Guide at https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/ ... _Guide.pdf

Agreed that using optimized/proxy media could be a solution.

If you want to play with 4K on a laptop you'll need to create proxies (optimized media). Even then there's no guarantees, but at least you're more likely to have hardware support for a low-res proxy.

Go into the Task Manager's performance area and you can see how much RAM you are using. If it's maxed, then you will probably be helped with more RAM. You can also create optimized media in Resolve and/or lower the timeline resolution. Those choices alone can enable you to edit on underpowered machines.

Hope that helps.

So, when I scrub through the timeline my CPU and RAM usage are maxed, but my GPU usage stays below 20%. I'll consider an overclock and more RAM.

Sent from my SM-G935U using Tapatalk

If you can't upgrade then you would be better off using some other piece of software that isn't as GPU bound as Resolve. Overclocking and adding RAM won't help because you can't add more VRAM which is the bottleneck here.

4k at 100 MBit/s ... it's .h264 encoded, yes?

The studio-version of Resolve does .h264 faster than the free version.

Maybe that helps.

Thanks.
Peter

On the Mac? I don’t think so.

Go into the Task Manager's performance area and you can see how much RAM you are using. If it's maxed, then you will probably be helped with more RAM. You can also create optimized media in Resolve and/or lower the timeline resolution. Those choices alone can enable you to edit on underpowered machines.

Hope that helps.

So, when I scrub through the timeline my CPU and RAM usage are maxed, but my GPU usage stays below 20%. I'll consider an overclock and more RAM.

Sent from my SM-G935U using Tapatalk

Please do realize that lowering timeline resolution is maybe the easiest way to improve performace. Simply choose a resolution that divides evenly into your source material's full raster. For example 1,920 X 1,080 evenly devides into UHD 4K. You can even divide in half again and go to 960 X 540.

Hope that helps

If you can't upgrade then you would be better off using some other piece of software that isn't as GPU bound as Resolve. Overclocking and adding RAM won't help because you can't add more VRAM which is the bottleneck here.

A 965M is probably on par'ish with a GTX 1050, except Laptop GTX 1050 and 1050Ti have 4GB VRAM instead of 2. A Laptop 1050 is practically unusable with Resolve 15 - in my experience - unless all you do is cut footage with it and play around in the Fairlight Tab.

Color and Fusion Pages are going to bottleneck that GPU before it even reaches VRAM Capacity. Give a 965M 64GB VRAM, and it will still be equally bad.

8GB RAM is too little. 16GB minimum.