Why is Fusion so slow

I had been using Fusion for drop shadows on PNGs and the delta keyer. On version 15 I was get in the range of 5fps. on 16 it has dropped to .5-1fps. Any Ideas?
Thanks
Windows 10 Pro
Alienware 15 r3
32GB ram
Gtx1070
SSD raid 0

I had been using Fusion for drop shadows on PNGs and the delta keyer. On version 15 I was get in the range of 5fps. on 16 it has dropped to .5-1fps. Any Ideas?
Thanks
Windows 10 Pro
Alienware 15 r3
32GB ram
Gtx1070
SSD raid 0

When I had 2xGTX1070 with 32 GB RAM it was the speeds that I noticed with certain effect. Fusion is very resource hungry

Fusion is very resource hungry

The Fusion-page perhaps, but Fusion has always been one of the most memory efficient pieces of software I used to work with. I even did 2K VFX shots for feature films on a Dual 1Ghz with 4 Gb of ram without it crashing, way back in 2007 or so. Fusion standalone has become quicker in version 16, so my guess is that there's something else that's causing this. Also, as soon as you start adjusting the Delta Keyer it gets slower quick.

for some reason, fusion (standalone as well as in resolve) has always been slow/not so reliable for me. still cannot figure out why.

i hope one day most of the effects in fusion will be as quick as those in the color page. it's lightning fast over there. i try to stay away from fusion as much as possible, due to all the potential stress it can give.

if i want to pull a key/animate 2d stuff/do some effects, my heart is telling me fusion, but mister deadline on my shoulders says colortab/after effects. i still keep using both though, because its fun.

some day soon..

Rick. Would you say that fusion studio is any faster than fusion in Resolve? I am only getting 5fps with some simple text nodes in Resolve and am considering buying Fusion studio to see if it can be faster. Do you think it is?

Fusion stand alone is faster from my experience. You also feel a bit cage with the resolve version for some reason… hard to explain.

Rick. Would you say that fusion studio is any faster than fusion in Resolve? I am only getting 5fps with some simple text nodes in Resolve and am considering buying Fusion studio to see if it can be faster. Do you think it is?

(test done very quickly)

Hello Harold,

with your system, you must be able to get better results.
DR16b4 - iMac Pro 2017 - 2.3GHz 18 Core 64GB
- Radeon Pro Vega 64 16GB + Radeon VII 16GB

I tried without cache with a BRAW in Fusion TAB and I get RT in reading.

Fusion_Tab_RT.jpg

In EDIT Tab, I have RT read with a Title+ 3D Text and the result of Fusion TAB.

Edit_Tab_RT.jpg

Do you have the right drivers?

(OK I do not have the same GPU but you have a Radeon VII)

Rick. Would you say that fusion studio is any faster than fusion in Resolve? I am only getting 5fps with some simple text nodes in Resolve and am considering buying Fusion studio to see if it can be faster. Do you think it is?

Fusion 9 standalone is faster than the page in R16 on my machine, for sure.

I am not sure if that has changed in F16 Studio.

Feels like you have to throw way more specs at the Resolve page to get comparable performance.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

As a big fan of resolve, (dumped adobe all together for it) not a fan of fusion.
I tend to use blender for vfx, just because of performance and results. Its just easier and more efficient to do effects in Blender.
I tried to love fusion, but its just painful to use

So I decided that I have spent too much time thinking about and researching the performance of Fusion Studio versus Fusion in Resolve. More time than the application costs. So I bought a Fusion Studio 9 dongle today.

Oh, Jean, thanks for doing the test. I don't know about drivers, as the old ad said "I'm a Mac". (Sorry, had to do it.)

I took the timeline that I need the Fusion for, removed the Fusion composition, and created a new timeline with a new composition. With only the Media In and Media Out nodes, Resolve was rendering at 20fps. Ugh.

After installing the Fusion Studio 16 and using "New VFX Composite Clip" in Resolve, the empty Fusion composition (with in and out nodes) renders at full speed.

The most amazing thing is that I was able to go to the composition I had in Resolve with the 9 Text nodes, a couple of Blurs, and the requisite merges, select them all and copy with Command-C. Then in Fusion Studio, I just did a paste (Command-V) and voila.

Initially it rendered at 8fps, but soon cached and ran at full speed. With changes it does go back to 8 or 9 fps so I hope to make it faster. I will need to experiment with settings that can make this faster and perhaps add Render nodes on other hosts or VMs.

It does not seem to use the GPUs and it seldom gets the CPU over 30%.

Harold - your last statement interests me as I have observed the same - slow performance but neither GPU nor CPU are fully taxed. I would think to look for other bottlenecks such as the storage pipeline but that didn't seem to be the case either. I'll have to go back and do some more testing some day.

I don't think it is my storage. Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test reports 2.4GB/s read on my boot disk and 1.2 GB/s on my media drive.

I did notice in Studio that I have options about the GPU; Auto, Disable, or Enable. It does not seem to matter which combination of these I use, it is slow to do a simple scrolling text (4fps). It seems faster than doing it in Resolve and, when I return to Resolve the animation is rendered so it does not slow down my playback when I am working on other things. So far I think having Studio will make things a bit faster, but not much. Once I get a few render nodes running, though, hopefully I can be running at full speed.

The Fusion page in Resolve doesn't seem to support simultaneous branching, which can significantly impact performance in some cases. I imagine that there's some complexity in getting this to work well inside Resolve, and the case could be made that it is less important than it used to be as some nodes are making better use of the GPU.

What I don't understand is why the Fusion page in Resolve will not seem to play cached frames at 24fps. This makes it very difficult to preview what an animation will look like without jumping into the edit page and waiting an unspecified amount of time for the render to complete. I wonder if it has to do with the way my system is configured. Who else has experienced / found a solution to this problem?

Hello, is there any progress in this post query? I am also stuck with a very slow machine using Fusion in Resolve.

Thank you

Hello, is there any progress in this post query? I am also stuck with a very slow machine using Fusion in Resolve.

Thank you

we all have the same problem bro

Just used Fusion in DR16 for the DeKeyer (is that right?) so I could insert a Subscribe element and remove the greenscreen effect. I tried the Alphamat in Color but since there's motion green was remaining. Fusion worked better.

Having said all that, whenever I try to use fusion my RAM usage Spikes (I have 64GB of ram) the entire application slows down and I can just forget about smooth scrubbing. What's the point of this powerful tool if it hobbles my system and makes the DR experience nearly unusable.

What key settings should I be using to make this a better experience?

Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Ryzen 2800X
64GB of Ram at 3000MHz CL14
Nvidia GTX 1080.

Do I need to set up a cache drive or something, if so can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to do that. Thanks

Has there been any update on this? _ it seems like its both mac and windows issue yes?

I'd suggest VFX Connect with standalone Fusion.

I'm running Resolve on an iMac Pro 10-core with 32gb Ram and the Vega 64x 14gb GPU and I experience the same issues. Simple transitions slow down the playback.
Even when using Fusion Memory cache and setting Render Cache to User, I can't play back transitions nor titles.
The only way so far is to jump to the fusion page, render it there and then return to the edit page which then plays back fine.
What's the purpose of creating Cache if even that doesn't play back properly. Can't imagine my current machine is too slow for even simple fusion operations...

I always use VFX connect, too many issues with Fusion in Resolve on my PC. It is quicker, more stable and simpler, to work in stand alone Fusion in my opinion.

On my computer too Fusion is crawling slow. Even a paint node with a few paint strokes for cloning gets me 2 fps with a Nvidia rtx 3090. The Color tab effects fly real time even having all denoise to the max and many nodes. Something not right with that speed. I have my cache to an NVME and run on SSDs 48 RAM on an i7 8700.....I see how the new apple chip performs and I wish I would get a small fraction of that speed.

Does stand-alone fusion have the same issue for you?

I don't use the standalone version. Fusion has been always slow in my computer i thought that updating o a faster graphic card would solve the problem but this is not the case. The only thing to update is to something with more cores but it is weird that only with a single paint node I get 2fps. i cannot imagine to work with more complex node trees if i get this slow performance, at least not in 4K with braw files

More cores won't likely help. Less cores might as each core would likely be faster. Also, Fusion often seems to use just one core and generally only one GPU (based on what I see from the performance meters). It really depends on what you are rendering.

You might also be impacted by the size of Fusion caching that you have configured. I found that when I set the Fusion cache to a large size (when I had 64G), the virtual memory size of fusion was 64G. As a result, there was paging and swapping and that would have slowed the system down.

Try limiting the Resolve and Fusion cache to 50% or 60% of your memory so that your system has room for disk caching and other tasks and see if that helps.

FYI: The standalone version seems faster than the version in Resolve so you might want to try that also. The latest version should work with the Resolve activation key. (I think the render node still needs the dongle as mine complains about "no license" if the dongle is not in place but the Fusion Studio will run with or without it now.)

I will try your suggestions and if it does not improve things I will give Fusion a try although I use it only at a very basic level. But 2 frames per second brings all my workflow to a halt.
Thanks a lot for your help.

When you try the stand-alone Fusion, you will want to experiment with the format of the media you pass to it. On my system, with 4k float16 OpenEXR Fusion initially plays very slowly - about 3 fps. Once cached it runs quickly. If I export in h.264, on the other hand, it plays at full speed without needing to cache.

With exrs I’d suggest trying different compression methods, they are not all made equal speed and size wise, so can have different leverage depending on cou and disk IO.

I found PiZ to be the best for my system. They were all about the same playback speed but varied in size a bit.

After testing all the combinations of formats that I could get from the Deliver page in Resolve, I found out a few things:

- it didn't matter much which I used. Resolve could load and play all the formats at full speed, Fusion could not. (I think Resolve has better code for reading the files and I think it is multi-threaded while I think Fusion is not. I say this because Resolve reading compressed EXRs uses both GPUs and all 18 cores at 50% and does so at full clip speed right away. Fusion, on the other hand, barely uses one GPU and only seems to use one core at 100% and cannot do better than 3fps until it is cached.)
- not all the formats are available in VFX Connect.
- Fusion gets confused if you try to use VFX Connect with a h264 input to Fusion but change the composition to render EXR. It then tried to generate each frame with a different version number.
- the fastest workflow for me is to not use VFX Connect but just 'deliver' the h264 to Fusion, get Fusion to render EXRs, and load the EXRs as clips in the timeline. I expect the quality may be a bit lower and some nodes may not do as well with this workflow.
- the simplest round-trip workflow is to use VFX Connect with the EXR, live with the slow initial read of a clip, and enjoy the benefit of Resolve getting the clip back without having to remember which clip is where.
- in order to ensure I have backups (since the VFX Connect files and comp are in a tmp folder that is fast but not backed up), I moved the comp to another location that is backed up and use a sym-link to the tmp location where Resolve and Fusion find the composition.

As someone suggested earlier in this thread, it may be better to use Blender. I plan to try it once I am done with this project.

Using Blender for comp.. don't get your hopes up.

If only one core is pegged and others sit idle decoding is single-threaded. Exr decoding is cpu only (never heard of gpu implementation), so Resolve side probably simply has better decoding mechanism.

I think the day Fusion uses GPU and not CPU that will be day that the speed will improve 10 fold if you have a beefy graphic card. Inside Fusion I can work fine once I go outside to the colour page it doesn't matter if I have a quarter resolution , optimized media whatever...it slows down to 1fps. Same thing when I render 1fps . GPU use 0 CPU use 100%. My CPU (i7_8700) passes all the benchmarks tests as average compared to the same processor by other people. I just think it's the CPU that can not hold up if some kind of actions inside Fusion (In my case creating a frozen frame inside the clip, use the clone tool to paint away some stuff and track the motion). 8 nodes that bring my system to its knees. It might be the newest version 17 because I have never seen this so slow. Also When I render it does not take into consideration the work done visible on the Fusion and color page even if it renders at 1fps.

Sorry to necrobump but the same bare-bones OpenFX plugin (color invert) works real-time in color page but very choppy in fusion page. Do we at least know why?

Machine is 13900k, 4090, 64gb ram.