Laptop i7 8550u + eGPU(8GB) vs i7 8750h + dedicated GPU(8GB)

Hi Everyone.

I'm shifting to DaVinci Resolve, because...of reasons...
I like the fact that the software can fully take advantage of the GPU. Plus this can give me an excuse to upgrade some hardware.
I'm forced to go with a windows laptop, because...of reasons...
Hence something started to bug me and still I haven't find an answer:

- Is there a big difference in performance between the 4 cores i7 found in many ultrabooks and the 6
core of modern gaming laptops when comes to DaVinci Resolve?
- At what point the GPU becomes more important than the raw CPU power?

This can be an interesting turning point since on the one side we could have a 13 inches laptop with just a lot of ram and a 4core i7 which becomes a beast when plugged to the eGPU versus one of those heavy and bulky gaming/workstations "laptops".

Is there anyone that has run some tests on the subject? Or just cine-bench and regular gaming test can be indicative?

Thank a lot to whoever will help on this. Looking forward to be part of the Resolve Community

Davide

Forget about eGPU. Buy gaming laptop with 6 cores and good GPU- GTX 1070 etc.
When you try to us more than 1 GPU match them. Resolve always will be limited by slowest GPU and its RAM size.

When you want a beast Resolve machine this means proper workstation with dual Xeons and 2 GPUs. Forget about laptop and word "beast" for Resolve
13inch quad core laptop for Resolve is bare minimum, so stop dreaming
I hope you are not planning to use 4K source?

Whenever someone is asking me which computer to get, I ask one question back:
What do you want to do with it?

If you need to work with 8K (or 5K for that matter) Red footage or 4.6K DNGs in a 4K timeline, I just second Andrew's opinion: get a serious desktop. If you want to do some creative editing on the road with offline clips in 720p resolution and codecs like DNxHD or ProRes, any decent laptop will do. The rest is somewhere in between.

Thank you both for the replies.

I will be always aware than a laptop will never be able to be compared to a fix workstation.
Still, in 2018 we are able to seamlessly run at ultra any AAA gaming title on the new 6 cores 1070 MaxQ laptops or on the 4 cores 1070/80 eGPU (extenal desktop gpu) . Which was almost unthinkable one year ago (thanks Oba....Moore's Law)

I've read in the forum about the guy who use his dell XPS15 for offline 4k video like a charm (the pc has half of the gpu I'm speaking about and nowhere near the thermals of the "gaming laptops") . We still haven't see any data about it but if it's true is a good example of what I would like to achieve with double the GPU.

Still, my question was about the use of CPU vs GPU in DaVinci Resolve. I was asking how much the CPU cores are vital and up to when 0.2 Ghz make the difference, when you have same raw graphic power, since in gaming apparently it isn't.

That said I'm no pro, I don't edit 8k video, 4k very rarely. i would use Resolve mostly for 1080p 60fps offline stuff. Since the majority of the persons I'll distribute the video to will not have screens that can go higher of that res.

Thanks again for the help on this one
Cheers

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.

The guy who use his dell XPS15 for offline 4k video write that he is using the Studio version of Resolve.
One of the differences to the free version is that it have hardware decoding of H.264 (AVCHD) in 4:2:0 in the GPU. And only 4:2:0. I expect him to use that. Here is a link to the API used:

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-vid ... ECFeatures

But else, I all ways recommend to use a medium to large size laptop. It is needed to get rid of the generated heat.

Regards Carsten.

Thank you both for the replies.

I will be always aware than a laptop will never be able to be compared to a fix workstation.
Still, in 2018 we are able to seamlessly run at ultra any AAA gaming title on the new 6 cores 1070 MaxQ laptops or on the 4 cores 1070/80 eGPU (extenal desktop gpu) . Which was almost unthinkable one year ago (thanks Oba....Moore's Law)

I've read in the forum about the guy who use his dell XPS15 for offline 4k video like a charm (the pc has half of the gpu I'm speaking about and nowhere near the thermals of the "gaming laptops") . We still haven't see any data about it but if it's true is a good example of what I would like to achieve with double the GPU.

Still, my question was about the use of CPU vs GPU in DaVinci Resolve. I was asking how much the CPU cores are vital and up to when 0.2 Ghz make the difference, when you have same raw graphic power, since in gaming apparently it isn't.

That said I'm no pro, I don't edit 8k video, 4k very rarely. i would use Resolve mostly for 1080p 60fps offline stuff. Since the majority of the persons I'll distribute the video to will not have screens that can go higher of that res.

Thanks again for the help on this one
Cheers

Don't apply gaming measurement to Resolve- one doesn't always translates to another. Resolve needs CUDA cores and fast internal memory pipe in GPU.

"4K working like a breeze on laptop" will be for very specific situations only: mainly specific sources. If you work with h264 then you want Resolve Studio which has GPU accelerated h264 decoding (only with Nvidia though). Then you have another limitation- it works only for 4:2:0 h264 files, so most sources from eg GH5 won't be decoded on GPU, but CPU and then your CPU will be hammered and "breeze" changes into crawling.

Your 2xGPUs will do good thing only once sources is decoded in realtime (or faster). If you CPU is weak then this won't happen, so your GPU power is meaningless. It all depends on your source types.
If you want to stay light then get one of the thinner gaming laptops:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Notebookc ... 456.0.html

If you want to work mainly with HD then good 4 core should work fine, but I would really vote for laptop with modern CPU, like Core i7-8750H and GTX 1070. This should fairly well balance itself and you won't need any eGPU.

You can in theory work with 4K even on dual core laptop, but then you have to optimise source files. Latest Resolve can use fractional decoding for Cineform:

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=77275

but this means a lot of transcoding/optimising media which takes time (again- will take long time on dual core laptop). If you have time you can use this approach and leave transcoding over night (also exports).

What type of source files you are going to use?
As always I would also question use of Resolve for simple editing (there are better suited NLEs for this, like Edius), but this is different subject.

I'm using a 2018 MBP i7, with an eGPU. I'm typically getting about render times a bit over twice as fast with the eGPU.

You mean Mac?
You don't have fast internal GPU, so eGPU does help.
If you had GTX 1070 in your laptop then things were different.

Macbook pro; autocorrect changed it to Map.