Terrible playback

Hey folks. New here, and new to davinci resolve. I've been a long time Premere pro user and looking to switch.
I have used pp on my desktop for year with no hiccups but recently purchased a new zenbook for work bit would like to do a little video editing while traveling. I was not expecting a power house but figured the new ryzen 7 3700u would have no trouble editing a little 1080p h.264 footage. But it can't seem to handle anything. Play back in very glitchy and unusable for editing. I've tried many types of footage and it won't even play 360p footage back smoothly.
I've tried everything I could think of in the settings but nothing seems to change. Even followed several tutorials to resolve similar issues but no luck. Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Specs:
Zenbook 14
4700u
Nvidia Mx350
16gb
512gb sad

[Peter Chamberlain]

The GPU in that zBook is significantly under powered for Resolve as we use GPU for image processing.
Also, on the free version h.264 is only using the CPU for decompression where as the Studio version with a better GPU can decode in GPU hardware.

You can try making dnxhd optimized media, details in the manual, as thats much easier to play.

thanks for the reply Peter!

I have tried generating optimized media but it had no change in my issue. While my footage is playing back I get the little green indicator over my playback window showing that it isn't dropping any frames, but you can obviously see that it is. Even with low quality clips it just doesn't play right. I've uninstalled and re-installed with no change.
I installed premiere pro last night and it works 100%. Even with 4k, colour graded footage it would hardly drop a frame.
I'm just curious if this could be a driver or software issue on either side, AMD or DaVinci Resolve?

[Peter Chamberlain]

Resolve uses the GPU for all image processing so u need a reasonable GPU even for basic operation.

I had the same problem. Resolve uses OpenCl with MX350 by default and it causes these problems. To use MX350 and its CUDA cores you have to update your drivers AND install Resolve 17.

It solved my issue completely and 1080p editing of small projects is smooth as butter. Do not expect to edit 4k feature-length movies, though - 2 gigs of GDDR5 memory is just not enough