- Posts: 381
- Joined: Sun Oct 11, 2015 12:49 pm
- Location: Maribor, Slovenia
- Real Name: Joseph Linaschke
Hey folks,
I don't know if this is Resolve 18 related or Resolve in general.
tl;dr — I installed an Afterburner and even though it's definitely working, I don't see a difference.
I have a Mac Pro and just picked up a used Afterburner card for half price. Sweet! I work almost exclusively in ProRes, multicam 4K30, and honestly in FCP never had an issue so never bothered getting the card. Resolve though drops a lot more frames and in heavy multicam I often have to let it stutter or close the multicam window, which isn't what I bought this crazy Mac for. So when I found a used card I decided to get it.
I'm running Resolve 18 of course and built a test timeline before I installed the card. My methodology (possibly flawed; you tell me) was to build a timeline wtih 1, 2, 4, 6 then 9 streams of 4K30 (no effects, just the scaled clips on the timeline), then kept pushing it to 12 and finally 16 tracks. I turned off all caches and enabled "show all video frames", hit play and watched the fps counter.
Pre installation of the card, it didn't drop below 29.97 until I hit 9 streams, and that dropped to 27fps. Then with 12 streams it dropped to 19 fps, and at 16 streams, 15.5 fps.
Each stream is about 600Mbit/s, and my MNVMe RAID tests with read speed of 2250 MB/s — so at the max of 16 streams, that's 16 × 600 = 9,600 mb/s which is 1200 MB/s — so just a little over half the bandwidth. This should not be a drive speed issue.
Playing back all 16 streams, iStat Menus reports that the CPU is pegged at 78% and the GPU's CPU is 97%, and GPU's VRAM is at 85%. OK great! I'm maxing out the computer, so an Afterburner should make a real difference, right?
Well, card installed… preference in Resolve set to use Afterburner… the Activity Monitor's Afterburner window shows it working… and playing back that same 16 stream test, oh YEAH you can see the Afterburner cooking (only using about half its power), and the CPU usage on the Mac is a paltry 11%! Amazing.
But? But I'm still getting identical fps playback performance. 27fps with 9 streams, 19fps with 12, and 15.5fps with 16.
Is this what is expected? I literally just installed this so haven't done any real work, and maybe I'll feel that things are faster / smoother as I edit and add fx and grade and so-on. But I'm very surprised that this simple test gave no different results, even though the power load is clearly being distributed. To be clear, I'm never editing with that many streams — that was a stress test. But I do edit five to eight stream mutlicams with color, fusion, etc on the timeline.
So, I guess the questions are…
1. Am I testing the wrong thing?
2. Since the GPU is still pegged, is that the weak point?
3. If the GPU is the weak point, will I see a benefit from the Afterburner elsewhere in Resolve?
4. What is the meaning of life, anyway?
Thanks guys,
-Joseph
I don't know if this is Resolve 18 related or Resolve in general.
tl;dr — I installed an Afterburner and even though it's definitely working, I don't see a difference.
I have a Mac Pro and just picked up a used Afterburner card for half price. Sweet! I work almost exclusively in ProRes, multicam 4K30, and honestly in FCP never had an issue so never bothered getting the card. Resolve though drops a lot more frames and in heavy multicam I often have to let it stutter or close the multicam window, which isn't what I bought this crazy Mac for. So when I found a used card I decided to get it.
I'm running Resolve 18 of course and built a test timeline before I installed the card. My methodology (possibly flawed; you tell me) was to build a timeline wtih 1, 2, 4, 6 then 9 streams of 4K30 (no effects, just the scaled clips on the timeline), then kept pushing it to 12 and finally 16 tracks. I turned off all caches and enabled "show all video frames", hit play and watched the fps counter.
Pre installation of the card, it didn't drop below 29.97 until I hit 9 streams, and that dropped to 27fps. Then with 12 streams it dropped to 19 fps, and at 16 streams, 15.5 fps.
Each stream is about 600Mbit/s, and my MNVMe RAID tests with read speed of 2250 MB/s — so at the max of 16 streams, that's 16 × 600 = 9,600 mb/s which is 1200 MB/s — so just a little over half the bandwidth. This should not be a drive speed issue.
Playing back all 16 streams, iStat Menus reports that the CPU is pegged at 78% and the GPU's CPU is 97%, and GPU's VRAM is at 85%. OK great! I'm maxing out the computer, so an Afterburner should make a real difference, right?
Well, card installed… preference in Resolve set to use Afterburner… the Activity Monitor's Afterburner window shows it working… and playing back that same 16 stream test, oh YEAH you can see the Afterburner cooking (only using about half its power), and the CPU usage on the Mac is a paltry 11%! Amazing.
- afterburner installed
- CleanShot 2022-05-09 at 16.42.38@2x.png (120.83 KiB) Viewed 1299 times
But? But I'm still getting identical fps playback performance. 27fps with 9 streams, 19fps with 12, and 15.5fps with 16.
Is this what is expected? I literally just installed this so haven't done any real work, and maybe I'll feel that things are faster / smoother as I edit and add fx and grade and so-on. But I'm very surprised that this simple test gave no different results, even though the power load is clearly being distributed. To be clear, I'm never editing with that many streams — that was a stress test. But I do edit five to eight stream mutlicams with color, fusion, etc on the timeline.
So, I guess the questions are…
1. Am I testing the wrong thing?
2. Since the GPU is still pegged, is that the weak point?
3. If the GPU is the weak point, will I see a benefit from the Afterburner elsewhere in Resolve?
4. What is the meaning of life, anyway?
Thanks guys,
-Joseph
https://youtube.com/photojoseph
Resolve Studio 18.6.5
macOS Sonoma 14.2.1
MacBook Pro M2 Max
96GB RAM
Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini on 10gb network
Synology RS1221+ 10gb
Blackmagic UltraStudio 4K Mini
ATOMOS NEON 4K reference monitor
Resolve Studio 18.6.5
macOS Sonoma 14.2.1
MacBook Pro M2 Max
96GB RAM
Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini on 10gb network
Synology RS1221+ 10gb
Blackmagic UltraStudio 4K Mini
ATOMOS NEON 4K reference monitor