boagz57 wrote:...My original video encodes use mostly the HVEC (H.265) codec but I thought I remembered seeing that Davinci supports hardware acceleration for this codec now...
I don't have a Windows machine to test but on my M1 Ultra Mac Studio running Resolve Studio 18.0.4 using a 4k/23.98 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC source file, it generated 50% ProRes proxies at about 400 frames/sec. IOW it would take about 35 sec to create proxies on a 10-minute 4k/23.98 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC source clip. At least on that platform it seems to be using hardware acceleration for decode and probably for ProRes encode but even with hardware acceleration it's probably throttled by the single-stream HEVC decode rate. The performance was about equal between FCP 10.6.4 and Resolve Studio 18.0.4 on this hardware, which shows how fast Resolve is despite being multi-platform.
I then tried using Apple Compressor (which can transcode multiple streams in parallel) to create proxies on four 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC input files, and the aggregate conversion rate was 620 frames/sec, so definitely not linear performance scaling (despite the Ultra CPU's four independent decode/encode units). As nVidia and AMD begin creating GPUs with multiple video accelerators, that will be an interesting to watch on Windows platforms -- IOW how well parallel encode/decode tasks scale across the multiple units. Using Apple Compressor on M1 Ultra, it's not currently working as well as you might hope.