Will my machine run Davinci Resolve 15?

I have a Dell T5400 with 2 quad core Xeon E5450 processors running at 3Ghz, 32Gb of RAM and a GTX 770 video card. It works fine for doing the tutorials but I will upgrade the video card to something like a 1080Ti. I've upgraded as far as I can except for a SSD and the video card but I don't know if, even with these upgrades, it will run well because it's an older machine and uses Xeon processors and isn't all that fast compared to newer machines. Thanks for any input.

What's your typical footage? I'm not sure if this machine will have realtime decoding of H.264/265.

For now I will be doing mainly simple music videos at 5 or 6 minutes long. 1080p at most. I've done several of these using Movie Studio 14 and PowerDirector 16. The RAM is DDR2 too so I don't know how much of a bottleneck that will be.

a GTX 770 video card

Hi.

I don't know if you use the Free or the Paid Studio version of resolve?

But only the Studio version have Hardware decoding/encoding af H.264 (AVCHD). Kepler support only 8 bit YUV 4:2:0

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

If you like a new Desktop is it a good time to buy one. AMD have just introduced the second generation Threadripper CPU's and the price of the previous generation 12 cores 24 threads 1920X is low. And after the announcement of the new nVidea RTX video cards are the prices on Amazon.com and many other places for the previous generation GTX 1080 Ti also lower, than it was just one month ago.

Regards Carsten.

i have two t5500's running v15 studio, both with 2x 5690's and 1x1050Ti's in them, similar machine to the 5400 with newer gen cpu's

they are used for conform, tweaking and media manageing shows in HD timeline and sending to a NAS for the hero machines to get high value work done in 4k

the t5500's work great for what i ask them to do, but i don't ask all that much from them, strictly HD timelines

i'd question the value of a1080Ti in your machine, the chances of useing the 11g of vram on the 1080Ti is a square root of zero on a machine with 5450's, save the cash and grab a 1050Ti for next to nothing

have a good plan for the near future, the capacatatiors on that machine are nearing a deacde old, they will be hitting the point of random fails soon

i'm moveing my t5500's out and replaceing them with out of lease z620's, the first z620 is sitting beside the older t5500 already.... my local market has alot of redurb'd z420/620/820's currently

i have out of support NukeX v7 licences tied to each t5500 so they will keep running as long as they can, the upgrade cost is higher than a new licence of NukeX, and really not worth it for my workflow, i've transitioned to Mamba, that covers my needs for now, likely fusion in Resolve will answer the problems i encounter finishing a show in the future anyway

Great info guys! Thanks so much. I'm running the free version of Resolve now. I guess I will upgrade the video card and know that this machine is at it's limit and keep using it until it won't do what I need anymore.

This is some great info guys! Thanks so much. The Zotac GTX 770 I have benchmarks at about 6000 according to Passmark and has a little over 1500 CUDA cores and 2GB of DDR3 memory and runs at about 1Ghz. The 1050 Ti benchmarks about the same but has half as many CUDA cores but has 4GB of DDR5 memory and runs at about 1.3Ghz. Will I see a huge gain upgrading? I guess I'll just run with this machine as is until it won't do what I need, then do a forklift upgrade. Thanks for the input.

To put it simple: CUDA cores will give you speed, while VRAM will give you resolution.

...only the Studio version have Hardware decoding/encoding af H.264 (AVCHD). Kepler support only 8 bit YUV 4:2:0

Hello Carsten, I am brand new to Resolve and this is my first post to this forum. Are you saying that the free version does not support GPU-assisted encoding, or that it only supports certain formats? Like Don, I have a GTX 770 card. Resolve sees it, but doesn't seem to use it for rendering.

Thanks,
-Mark

Hi.

Yes I am saying that the free version does not support GPU-assisted decoding/encoding.
To day many Intel CPU also support CPU-assisted decoding/encoding, but only for the Studio Version of Resolve.

The Studio NON supported formats will be decoding/encoding in slow software, together with all the formats from the FREE version.

Regards Carsten.

Well I thank you, but I have to admit that I'm really confused now, because I've been going back and forth with support, and so far there has been no mention of the fact that this problem could have anything to do with free vs Studio.

The entire conversation has been about my graphics card having "only" 2GB of RAM. That, and whether or not Resolve supports Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. That just seems weird to me.

-Mark

Hi.

You posted a Quote to my previous post. And I just wanted to confirm it and add some new information on CPU assisted decoding/encoding.

But I can confirm that 2 GB or less vRam is not recommended for Resolve.

I can also confirm that only Windows 10 is supported. I have read reports that some Windows Administrators/power users have succeed to run most of Resolve functions on Win 7 and 8's. But as I remember, is it not easy.

Regards Carsten.

Hi.

You posted a Quote to my previous post. And I just wanted to confirm it and add some new information on CPU assisted decoding/encoding.

But I can confirm that 2 GB or less vRam is not recommended for Resolve.

I can also confirm that only Windows 10 is supported. I have read reports that some Windows Administrators/power users have succeed to run most of Resolve functions on Win 7 and 8's. But as I remember, is it not easy.

Regards Carsten.

Yes sir, I guess I am a admin/power user, but in any case, Resolve runs just fine on my W7Pro64 machine. The only issue I'm having is that it won't leverage my GPU. There is not even a drop-down for it under the Codec box, so it seems that something it amiss. As a result, renders are taking a long time and then to make mattes worse, since it's maxing out the CPU, that makes the machine useless for doing anything else while waiting for the render to complete.

I think I understand where that 4GB recommendation is coming from, but at the same time, I'm not working with anything beyond 1080/30p, so I only have 1/4 of the pixels to deal with, compared to 4K. To say nothing of higher resolutions. Honestly, I don't think 1080p is all that hard...I've been dong it for well over a decade on much lesser hardware.

And to be clear, I'm not getting any warnings about resources - Resolve just doesn't surface the required dialog, so there's no way to even turn it on. I'm probably wrong, but I just don't believe that it can't work. Seems a shame to fall back to PowerDirector when Resolve seems better in every way except for rendering performance. But I need Windows 7, so I can't reasonably change that part right now. I could throw a different video card at it, but I have read in this forum where others are getting good results with 2GB cards, so the 4GB minimum does not seem to be set in stone.

This reminds me of the time that my internet speed was not what it should have been, but Comcast refused to address it because my modem was not on their preferred hardware list. I had to replace the modem in order to prove that there was nothing wrong with the existing one. Only then would they address the actual problem. Once they finally fixed it, I went back to the original modem, and it worked just fine, just as I had suspected all along. Even now, i have a spare cable modem.

Very frustrating.

-Mark

Hi.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O and compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better

And have you considered a dual boot with both Win 7 and Win 10?

Regards Carsten.

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O and compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better

I guess my point is that Resolve is NOT using the GPU for rendering. If I monitor CPU and GPU activity during a render, the GPU is doing nothing while the CPU is at 100 percent.

And have you considered a dual boot with both Win 7 and Win 10?

Yes, I have. And it may eventually come to that, but the trouble with that idea is that it basically doubles the maintenance overhead for the PC. There may be licensing issues for other software too, because depending upon how one looks at it, there would then be two machines instead of one. And of course just the expense, time and trouble of buying another SSD and installing all of the software that I need to get my job done. It usually takes me weeks to get comfortable with a new build, and even then, the little things tend to be discovered at the most inconvenient times.

And while I realize that it is futile to fight change, I just personally don't like Windows 10 as well as Windows 7. The GUI seems like a giant step backwards to me, and the heavy-handed forced upgrades have repeatedly broken our PCs that are running it. For example, on my shipping PC, it has caused missed deadlines, penalties, and untold hours of frustration trying to do something as simple as getting Windows 10 to use a thermal printer that worked perfectly the day before. I suppose it works okay for people who don't do anything but internet and email (and who like to do everything full screen), but it certainly hasn't worked well for me.</rant>

So with all of that said, if Resolve actually can run on Windows 7, then that would be my strong preference. It obviously DOES run, and clearly it IS using the GPU for a lot of things, so it's not like it can't use the GPU. It just comes down to understanding what is actually preventing it from utilizing the GPU for rendering.

-Mark

If the CPU is at 100%, the GPU is getting starved of data.

If you hate both W7 and W10 (for reasons I fully understand), get a Mac. No forced updates (yet?).
The fully featured Mac Mini with the Radeon 580 eGPU is no slouch.

Yes, I'm aware that PC hardware is cheaper for the same power. But maintaining a Hackintosh is no fun.

If the CPU is at 100%, the GPU is getting starved of data.

If you hate both W7 and W10 (for reasons I fully understand), get a Mac. No forced updates (yet?).
The fully featured Mac Mini with the Radeon 580 eGPU is no slouch.

Yes, I'm aware that PC hardware is cheaper for the same power. But maintaining a Hackintosh is no fun.

Well, to be clear, I like Windows 7. I think that it may be Microsoft's greatest achievement, finally resolving most of what was wrong with 2000 and Vista. I went straight from 98 to 7, as did all of the companies that I supported during that era. Windows 8 was much the same story. I made the mistake of "upgrading" my personal laptop and it was almost unusable. 8.1 restored some of the desktop functionality, but was still a terrible desktop OS. It was so bad that Microsoft skipped 9 altogether, if only to distance themselves from their failure. After enduring that debacle, it is fair to day that 10 is much better than 8. But 8 was a train wreck for desktop machines, so that's not saying much. I't still ugly, it still can't run legacy software, and it still forces updates that frequently make the host machine unable to willful its purpose, all at the expense of the support team, which in my case is me.

I certainly have considered the Apple universe, but unfortunately, most of the software that I need for my business will not run on a Mac. Unless you want to talk about Parallels, which while a step up from dual boot, is still a bit of a hack, bringing the same disadvantages of maintaining two OSes. And too, as a guy who has been using Windows since version 2, and who made a living supporting Windows as a consultant, I'm just a lot more conversant and comfortable with Windows, how ever irritating it may be.

But if I get to the point that I have the luxury of owning a machine that can be dedicated to certain applications, like DaVinci Resolve, it seems like that would be fun. Meanwhile, I still don't know how to make good use of my GPU.

-Mark

-Mark

Meanwhile, I still don't know how to make good use of my GPU

Unless I missed it, you have yet to reveal your CPU, or even specify whether you're using the Studio version or not. So you're not the only one confused.

Last I heard, you need at least 3GB on the GPU to take advantage of GPU-accelerated CUDA decoding, running Studio. If you don't fulfill both requirements, what you're seeing would appear to be exactly as expected.

Meanwhile, I still don't know how to make good use of my GPU

Unless I missed it, you have yet to reveal your CPU, or even specify whether you're using the Studio version or not. So you're not the only one confused.

Hello John, I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I haven't mentioned my CPU because you are the first to ask about it. But it's no secret - Intel i7. FWIW, I mentioned that I was using the free version in my first post. My logic was that if I could see good performance in the free version, I would then purchase the Studio version for the extra features. But if DaVinci Resolve can't run on the same hardware that runs half a dozen other NLE softwares, then it will be hard to justify buying it. Which would be a shame, because in spite of of the mantra, Resolve appears to run well on my hardware and OS, save for the slow rendering.

Without actually knowing, I suspect that it would be more useful to put hardware requirements into a table, since 4k and beyond is bound to be more taxing than 1080p. For example, at 1080p, my machine is rocket fast for both editing and rendering in the lowly CyberLink PowerDirector 16, but when I tried to work with 4k, it was barely acceptable. Pixel count certainly does seem to matter.

Last I heard, you need at least 3GB on the GPU to take advantage of GPU-accelerated CUDA decoding, running Studio.

I started out with a 2GB card, but I have since tested with a 8GB card. On my 1080p test project, there was no noticeable performance difference between the two cards.

If you don't fulfill both requirements, what you're seeing would appear to be exactly as expected.

I have been communicating with Josh in support and he has my log file from Resolve, so he certainly knows exactly what I have. I asked point blank (multiple times) if GPU rendering should work with the free version, but I have yet to get a "no". 'Not sure what to make of that. If it won't work with the free version, then I have wasted a lot of time talking about all of the other things that might be at fault.

-Mark

Hi Mark,

This is discussed in more detail at forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=83540 - sorry, I cannot post proper hyperlinks yet, too new here!

For info, the PDF DaVinci Resolve 15 Feature Comparison Guide on the Blackmagic support page (in the middle column entitled Latest Support Notes) states that both the Studio version and "high spec" Nvidia cards are required for GPU-accelerated H264 encoding on Windows & Linux only (H265 encoding was added later in 15.2 Studio).

However the term "high spec" Nvidia card is not specified. The recommended card is currently a 1080Ti but I run Studio 15.2.4 for hobbyist YouTube HD-only stuff on a 980Ti which works fine at this level and gives me the option of both native & GPU-assisted rendering.

Hi Mark,

This is discussed in more detail at forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=83540 - sorry, I cannot post proper hyperlinks yet, too new here!

For info, the PDF DaVinci Resolve 15 Feature Comparison Guide on the Blackmagic support page (in the middle column entitled Latest Support Notes) states that both the Studio version and "high spec" Nvidia cards are required for GPU-accelerated H264 encoding on Windows & Linux only (H265 encoding was added later in 15.2 Studio).

However the term "high spec" Nvidia card is not specified. The recommended card is currently a 1080Ti but I run Studio 15.2.4 for hobbyist YouTube HD-only stuff on a 980Ti which works fine at this level and gives me the option of both native & GPU-assisted rendering.

Thanks very much for the URL! I had found that thread before, but then lost track of it.

One can only guess what "high spec" might mean, but my GTX 770 can definitely do H.264 encoding, because it works great in NLE software other than Resolve. I'm not sure why this is such a cloudy subject. It's kind of like the mantra that Resolve won't run on Windows 7, even though there is no Windows 7 exclusion in the documentation. It does say that is will run on Windows 10 Founder Edition, but I took that to be addressing what would have been a new version of 10 at the time the document was written, not that it wouldn't work with any other Windows version.

And if you stop and think about it, why wouldn't it run on Windows 7? With close to 50 percent of the corporate world still on Windows 7, Blackmagic would be cutting their potential market in half. In terms of sheer numbers, it's a lot more than Mac users, and Blackmagic did make the software work on Mac. Maybe Windows 7 users are not the people they want, but there certainly are a lot of them.

-Mark

i have two t5500's running v15 studio, both with 2x 5690's and 1x1050Ti's in them, similar machine to the 5400 with newer gen cpu's

Hi Dermot,

I have a Dell T5500 with NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and Windows 10.

Your comment about running DR 15 Studio on Dell T5500s is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently, Davinci Resolve 12.5 runs very well set to CUDA. I'm looking to upgrade Davinci Resolve, but for the moment I can't change my PC studio setup. But I can get a different graphics card/cards.

And right now I'm happy to work in 1080p.

Q1 Does DR 14 run as well on OpenCL as DR 12.5 on CUDA 2.0 (DR 14 requires CUDA 3.0)?

Q2 What card or cards would I need to put into my machine to run DR 15, 16 or 17?

Here are my specs:
Dell Precision T5500
Windows 10 Professional, 64 bit
Intel Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz and 2.66GHz (2 processors)
48 GB RAM
DirectX 11
M-Audio Delta 1010LT Sound Card
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 Graphics Card

Looking forward to your reply,

Seamus