Are Faster CPUs/GPUs/Storage Offsetting RAM Requirements?

Hi Guys!

Do recent significant increases in CPU/GPU power along with faster RAM and Storage reduce/offset the amount of ram that is required by Davinci Resolve to operate properly?

For example, with 32 Gb of ram being the minimum requirement for Fusion, can a system with an Intel 12th/13th Gen CPU (i.e., i9-12900K) along with a GPU such as NVidia 3080Ti (with 16Gb VRAM) with 16Gb of DDR5 RAM and PCie Gen4 Storage provide NEAR SAME performance as a previous generation of hardware with 32Gb of RAM (i.e., Intel 11th Gen CPU such as i9-11900k, 16Gb NVidia 3060 Ti, 32Gb DDR4 RAM, and PCie Gen 3 Storage)? Or, is caching in ram always going to be a constant in Davinci Resolve/Fusion?

Thanks for any thoughts on this!

Bryan

Do recent significant increases in CPU/GPU power along with faster RAM and Storage reduce/offset the amount of ram that is required by Davinci Resolve to operate properly?

In my educated guess, this is like asking if putting a more powerful engine in your car means you can get away with a smaller gas tank. Engine power affects speed, the gas tank affects range - those are two different things.

In the case of Resolve, RAM and VRAM are used to store the image data being manipulated. Using a faster CPU doesn't change the amount of data to be manipulated. If you have a project complex enough to actually require 32GB of RAM and, say, 12GB of VRAM, a faster CPU or GPU isn't going to change that requirement. Insufficient RAM or VRAM won't merely make the project slower, it will simply prevent the project from working - regardless of CPU or GPU speed.

If you're only working on small, simple projects that don't require full use of RAM or VRAM, then the excess memory may be largely used for caching, and in that one case it may be that a more powerful CPU and/or GPU could make up for smaller RAM or VRAM that's able to cache less. But a lack of caching means you're going to be more affected by decoding and storage speed, which are both pretty slow compared to RAM - so I'm rather skeptical that even this effect would be a net benefit.

CPU and GPU gives you computing power. Which chip you use, that perfomance you can get. RAM gives CPU space for operating/store data/fast manipulations - so no matter how fast CPU you have, if for neded operation you have too small amount of RAM, this task in most cases won't be done. App will simply crash or stop.

So you have to have enough amount of RAM for CPU/VRAM for GPU to make work done. Higher RAM amount does not make CPU or app work faster.

Next step is - how fast. Here is question of perfomance of CPU and GPU, or DRAM speed (MHZ, type DDR4/5, latency). Also disk storage will have impact for speed of data access during scrolling on time line (but not raw conputing power for rendering or realtime processing)

In most cases RAM amount does not increase speed of your program as well - in most cases just alow to makes tasks to be done.

If you have slow GPU and slow CPU but 24GB of VRAM, you'll be able to run 8K timeline and work. If you have ultra fast CPU/GPU and only 8GB of VRAM you'll not able to work with 8K timeline. That's it. RAM amount is a first condition that must be filled.
If you have only 4GB of RAM and task that does not require more to be done, on the same CPU/GPU you'll get same perfomance as you would do this with more RAM.