Blackmagic Forum

Is a 2GB graphics card good enough for Resolve 17?, I do not do any heavy editing and wonder if a 2GB graphics card would be adequate..
Thanks you in advance for responding

It's not the editing, it's the color grading and FX which tax the GPU. If you're editing HD material, don't need GPU h.264/5 acceleration and don't require more than rudimentary color grading you shouldn't have any trouble. If you're editing 4K material on an HD timeline, you or may or may not be able to get by. If you're working with 4K material on a 4K timeline, forget it. If you use ofx at any resolution, don't expect real-time playback without clip caching.

Others here will swear you can't possibly work with less than 4GB for HD and 8GB for anything more. Assuming your system has a capable CPU, I don't agree, but try the free version and see for yourself.

I don't know that you could do much of anything on a 4K timeline with 2GB of VRAM.

I regularly edit 4K timelines on a GTX1060/6 and have to be a little careful when using temporal noise reduction, optical flow and other effects that try to buffer multiple pages in the GPU. Most of the time my card sits at about 3-4GB of VRAM used and it peaks to *almost* 6GB if I'm doing fancy stuff.

An HD timeline would be more forgiving me thinks... but hey, this is 2021, who uses HD timelines/deliveries these days?

Just as a data point, I edit 4k BRAW on an HD timeline and VRAM usage reaches 2.5 -> 3G quickly.

marleyboat wrote:Is a 2GB graphics card good enough for Resolve 17?, I do not do any heavy editing and wonder if a 2GB graphics card would be adequate..
Thanks you in advance for responding

I wouldn't buy a system with a 2gb GPU for editing in Resolve that's for sure but if this is the system you already have why not just give it a go and see what happens. I assume with 2gb we are talking here about a laptop or a very old desktop in which case other hardware limitations may also prevent smooth operation.

Short answer, no.

Get 8 GB VRAM at least.

I edit mostly 1080p footage in the free version. 2gb vram is fine for my needs. If you need stuff like noise reduction or whatever, and need 4k editing, it probably wont be enough.