Playback Completely Unusable in v19 – High-end hardware

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing serious playback issues in DaVinci Resolve 19; it's completely unusable – not just choppy but entirely unresponsive, making editing impossible. I’ve tried every optimization I could think of: using cache, proxies, and lowering the render resolution to the lowest available setting (720p at minimum framerate). None of these adjustments have improved the playback in any way.

My system (Intel i9 13900K and RTX 4090) should handle 4K editing and encoding smoothly, so I'm certain this isn’t a hardware limitation. I’ve also seen reports from other users with similar issues, with no clear solution in sight.

Can anyone confirm if this is a bug in version 19, or if there’s a known workaround? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Peter Chamberlain]

You can assume there are millions of users on v19 who are not seeing this as unusable.

Please have resolve generate diagnostic logs as per the FAQs and detail the system, codecs etc. so someone can assist.

[Shrinivas Ramani]

Hi Andreas

A few things to consider:

a. Codecs: if you're using commercial codecs, the Studio version is needed for native hardware accelerated playback. Please check if transcoding to mezzanine codecs, using proxies or optimized media helps.

b. Nvidia drivers: With versions 19.0 and above, the minimum Nvidia driver requirements are Studio 550.58 or above for Windows. Please check for the latest Nvidia Studio drivers, choose Custom Installation > Clean Installation to fully replace any previous driver remnants. Restart your system when prompted to ensure the new drivers are active.

c. Setup: Please confirm that all your displays are connected to the 4080 and not to the onboard Intel graphics. If you have multiple displays, please confirm that they are recognised by DaVinci Resolve in the Workspace menu under Dual Screen.

Regards
Shrinivas

I’ve tried every optimization I could think of

Here's an idea you maybe haven't thought of yet. It's drastic, but if nothing else works...

1. A Clean Install of Windows.

2. NOTHING but system and work programs installed. No email, no office, no games, no development, no security, etc. This machine is for editing only.

The idea being that something on your system is causing trouble, so getting rid of all things unnecessary may yield success.

I'm in the same boat. RTX 4080 Super, Intel 14900K, 64 gigs of 6800 RAM, Win11 Pro (Fresh install even), All SSDs, latest NVidia drivers etc. I cannot use 19 (19.0.3) Studio at all, it's like 2fps when playing timeline in a quarter quality and every caching option turned on. I consider it unusable. I've tried every optimization and "trick" people have suggested, none work.

I've had to "revert" to latest Studio version 18.6 which is about 1000% better in terms of performance (still not what I would expect from the computer I have, but at least I can work in it). Of course you can't downgrade your projects so hopefully you have copies what you need to work with that are pre v19.

Considering 18.6 vs 19 is such a gigantic difference, it's quite clear it's a software issue.

Same issue here but on a RTX 2080Ti and ryzen 3600, the playback goes down to 4.5FPS USING PROXIES. Reinstalling doesnt help. Im on version 19.0.3.
Tried all the different workarounds for several hours, to no avail.
I'm editing right now on my much weaker laptop but least I can get work done. It's bad.

The only time I see non-realtime playback is when I've applied NR or optical-flow/timewarp to a clip.

Other than that, even with 422 H265 source material UHD timelines of 60FPS still play smooth as butter.

Take note of the b section of the reply from Shrinvas. Resolve 19 needs the Nvidia driver to be 550.58 or newer to support CUDA 12. An older driver than this will make resolve use OpenCL and not CUDA with the consequential performance hit.

I agree compleatly, I have a project that i even made proxies from and it stutters on playback, the interface is slugish and choppy. Now i am stuck, glad i know how to edit in multiple editors. I hope they put a fix out, becase 19.03 is not working on my system, and i have one beefy system and RAID drives.
Look forward to useing DaVinci soon when the fix comes out. I know i cant go backwards on these projects, once the database has been optimised.

So, in essence, what we're saying is i must wait for the 4080 Super drivers to reach version 580 before I can get smooth playback on my timeline? I never had this issue before! Wow...

I run Davinci on two computers:

1) Home computer is an Intel i9-14900 with 64 GB ram and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. RUNS LIKE BUTTER!

2) My work computer is more powerful, an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X, 128 GB of ram and an Nvidia GeForce 4080 Super graphics card and I get unsmooth playback. I hope BM offers a fix soon.

So, in essence, what we're saying is i must wait for the 4080 Super drivers to reach version 580 before I can get smooth playback on my timeline?

Nope, you misread... 550.58 or later (not 580).

He typed 580. This is a cut and paste...

Take note of the b section of the reply from Shrinvas. Resolve 19 needs the Nvidia driver to be 580.58 or newer to support CUDA 12. An older driver than this will make resolve use OpenCL and not CUDA with the consequential performance hit.

However, Shrinivas DID say 550...

b. Nvidia drivers: With versions 19.0 and above, the minimum Nvidia driver requirements are Studio 550.58 or above for Windows. Please check for the latest Nvidia Studio drivers, choose Custom Installation > Clean Installation to fully replace any previous driver remnants. Restart your system when prompted to ensure the new drivers are active.

Or we can look at the Read Me on the support and download link says for 19.0.3

Minimum system requirements for Windows

Windows 10 Creators Update.
16 GB of system memory. 32 GB when using Fusion.
For monitoring, Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 12.9 or later.
Integrated GPU or discrete GPU with at least 4 GB of VRAM.
GPU which supports OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 12.
AMD/Intel official drivers from your GPU manufacturer.
NVIDIA Studio driver 550.58 or newer.

I've installed the latest studio drivers for my 2080Ti, no difference.

Sorry, that was a typo on my part. I've now corrected it.

Sorry, that was a typo on my part. I've now corrected it.

You da man!

By gollies, Peter Flink just might have solved everybody's conundrum!

Davinci 19 needs Cuda 12? Please confirm what I've found on the two Nvidia graphics cards specs:

1) Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super has 10240 cores.

2) Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 has 16384 cores.

My computer with the 4090 runs GREAT. My second computer with the 4080 Super runs a bit choppy. So then, is the 4080, with less cores, NOT Cuda 12? In other words, would 10240 cores be CUDA 10 and 16384 cores be CUDA 12 or CUDA 16?

Can somebody confirm this?

CUDA compute capability on both the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4090 is the same (8.9)... both support the latest driver which itself supports CUDA 12.6.

I find it implausible that BMD would release a version of Resolve that would require everyone ditch everything but the RTX 4090 or newer GPUs.

CUDA 12 is supported by NVIDIA GPUs with compute capabilities starting from the Ampere architecture (SM_80) and onwards. This includes:
• Ampere GPUs: RTX 3080, RTX 3090, RTX A2000, A3000, A4000, A5000, A6000, NVIDIA A40, RTX 3060, RTX 3070, RTX 3050, RTX A10, A16, among others.
• Hopper GPUs: H100 and H200 for optimal performance with CUDA 12.
Older architectures like Turing (SM_75) and Volta (SM_70) do not support CUDA 12.

Looks like RTX 2080Ti also supports CUDA 12, but not the RTX 1080Ti...

I got these results using Perplexity - is AI accurate?

Okay. Thank you. Also, my Davinci ran smooth as silk on my five year old computer installed with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080ti which only had 4352 cores. So we are back to square one.

I will go back to work today, wipe my system drive, perform a clean install of everything and share my findings. This has to be some kind of software glitch somewhere in the system. My home machine with the 4090 and Intel processor works flawlessly. My 4080 at work with the Threadripper processor is not smooth playback.

Stay tuned...

[Dwaine Maggart]

@Steve: There is no RTX1080Ti, so I'd say the AI is not accurate.

There is a GTX1080Ti, and it supports CUDA 12.

The for sure way to know if your NVIDIA GPU supports CUDA 12 is to go to the NVIDIA Driver Downloads site and enter you GPU type and see what the current driver available is. If it's 550.58 or higher, then it supports CUDA 12.

Based on some limited testing I recently did, it appears that any NVIDIA GPU that has CUDA Compute 5.0 or higher support should support CUDA 12.

However, GPU's with CUDA Compute 3.5 support (our previous minimum supported prior to Resolve 19) do not support CUDA 12.

So anyone with a GPU that has CUDA Compute 3.5 support should not upgrade to Resolve 19, as it's not going to work.

You can find CUDA Compute capability for most NVIDA GPUs at this WIKI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

Scroll about a third of the way down the page to the "GPUs supported" section.

I'm getting about 20 fps playback with 1080 H.264 SuperScaled to 2160 with my GTX 1070 in Resolve 19. (With my 3060, it's a smooth as silk 24 fps.)

I'm not sure 19 is the sole issue here.

Start looking for what's different about the systems that don't play well. Is anything overclocked? (Check the UEFI) Is there any software installed you don't need for editing? Look at plug-ins. Make sure CUDA is manually selected in the GPU Preferences. Make sure all displays are plugged into the GPU and not the mobo.

Do you mean "preferences" tab in Davinci? Where I also have the option to check off "use neural engine"?

Yep, that's it.

My home machine is a prebuilt gaming computer. Plug it in, turn it on. The specs are:

ASUS Z790 Gaming WiFi 7 MoBo
Intel i9-14900KF Processor
64 GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card
Windows 11 Home

Work computer (where I'm having a problem)

Gigabyte TRX50 Aero MoBo
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X processor
128 GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super
Windows 11 Pro (using temp version until I enter activation code)

I am sure there's software glitch somewhere. Oh, I don't know if this matters but... my preview pane ALWAYS shows 24p as the constant frame rate even though the playback is not smooth. The frame rate indicator stays constant at 24.

Okay gang, I solved the problem everybody seems to be having. It seemed to be a software issue with all of that extra MoBo crap like RGB, etc.

Here's what I did:

1) Wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Windows 11.
2) ONLY INSTALLED the BASIC, needed bardware drivers for the mobo.
3) Reinstalled Davinci 19.
4) Streamlined windows by removing themes/screen savers/fancy background pictures/turned off some background programs, etc.

Now she runs as smooth as butter.

It's not a Davinci Resolve 19 issue, nor is it a graphics card issue. It's a software issue when you download all the extra, not needed crap with a new mobo purchase. Wipe your hard drive, reinstall everything with just the important downloads and you'll be back in business!

That's a bit worrisome. Modern motherboards often have features that allows Windows to download and install the motherboard software without you even knowing about it. On Asus motherboards for example, you can turn it off but the moment you flash a new firmware to it you have to turn it off again before starting Windows.

Good that you found the issue and thanks for sharing the solution. That's a lesson many of us learned years ago but manufacturers are making it harder and harder to avoid.

They make you go through extra steps to stop their sneaky wyas of downloading stuff you do not want. When I update the bios I go through the bios menus to make sure they didn't turn on the auto downloads again.

Forum member Andrew I. Veli also gets credit for this.

I'm not one of you high-flying Techy types but, for what it's worth, I'm having the same problem on a brand new Mac Studio Ultra. Some clips are much choppier than others e.g. ones I've added noise reduction or sharpening to. It's as laggy as my old MacPro 2017. Another odd thing is the actual resolution of the timeline, I kept looking at it, thinking it was all a bit soft to look at and couldn't get the right result on a clip I had edited before in FCPX as part of another project. Sure enough after importing the previously rendered FCPX clip into the timeline and cutting just the clip in, the FCPX image was FAR superior. I'm yet to render this out from Davinci but just going on what I see in front of me. I hate FCPX because of the massive project files but I might have to head back I think, at least I know what I'm going to get. Attached a diagnostic log.

If it's looking softer in Resolve, it may be because Performance mode is activated. You can turn that off, but even if it's on it doesn't affect renders, just playback.

I have found if you are using any type of render cache and it isn't done caching, it will gltich the playback.

I have experienced this in Resolve 19.0.3 as well as Resolve 19.1

Based on some limited testing I recently did, it appears that any NVIDIA GPU that has CUDA Compute 5.0 or higher support should support CUDA 12.

I second that.

We have an - almost antique (like in 15ish years old) - workstation here, that we still keep running for some reasons.
It has a 4 GB GTX 980 that supports 5.2 (there is not even a studio driver for that thing), but it still runs 19.1 just fine.

Of course I can't barley use most of the AI based effects or run a 8k timeline for editing.
But still it does 8k braw material in an HD timeline for editing (which is IMHO a borderline miracle), pretty much all color grading I throw at it, and even some simple fusion.

Bottom line: pretty much everybody here has an computer, that is at least 10 times more powerful that this oldtimer - so, it's probably not your hardware.

Also, if render cache is caching a clip, if it rendered an earlier part of that clip, the earlier part will glitch until the end parts are recached.

Had a timeline consisting of five layers of exr 16bit sequences for vfx running totally smoothly with DNxHR 444 proxies at half res on Davinci 18. Upgraded to 19 today on the advice of my colorist. Intel i9, twin 1080i cards and installed every current driver including the latest Nividia 566.1. Even dropping the proxy res to 1/4 it still chops. Please fix this BlackMagic, it's no small thing to take a half day to roll back, will be watching the support page for an update.

EDIT: Some improvement, here's what I did:

1. Installed the Nvidia drivers again, so...twice.
2. Proxies at DNxHR 444 half res.
3. Switch monitor screen to Decklink mini 4k output.
Result: Timeline plays just as smoothly as it did in Davinci 18

Switch back to Davinci.
Edit Page Viewer Window ia still choppy as hell.
However, P full screen plays smooth now too.

IGNORE EVERYTHING ABOVE:

Sony RAW, which plays back brilliantly on a Davinci 18 timeline, intermintantly chops and stutters on 19.1.1.
Forced to rollback to 18, where everything is working just fine again. Hope BM can solve this or it means never moving beyond 18 for me.

So this is what is happening on my system BlackMagic, the edit page Viewer kills the playback. Hope this helps your troubleshooting.

I can't wait until this gets fixed, even having the 'green light 24 indicator' showing during playback whilst it looks more like 10fps playback is highly annoying. Switch back to 18 no issues, go forward to 19, same issues every time. There's a boat load of threads about this on reddit too

The speed indicator on the Exit page is not realistic, check in the Color page.

IGNORE EVERYTHING ABOVE:

Sony RAW, which plays back brilliantly on a Davinci 18 timeline, intermintantly chops and stutters on 19.1.1.
Forced to rollback to 18, where everything is working just fine again. Hope BM can solve this or it means never moving beyond 18 for me.

Sony RAW is pretty demanding, but an 8K anamorphic clip in X-OCN ST plays back on my humble laptop at 24 fps in a UHD timeline without reduced playback resolution. Scrubbing is a bit stuttery. This is without any grading, nevertheless all GPU and CPU cores are busy at about 75 to 80%.
Now, if I tried the same in 18.6.6, at first I didn't see much of a difference. But observing the activity of the hardware, I saw that the CPU cores went to 100% temporarily, while the GPU cores stayed around 50% most of the time. Now, when the CPU got to full load, there was some minor stutter showing.
Could it be that 18 had a different load distribution, shifting more of the load to the CPU, while freeing up some GPU power for grading? This might explain that 18 can run better on a stronger CPU with a weaker GPU, while 19 might show weaknesses of the GPU.
If this difference in load distribution is caused by DR or by Sony's SDK is still the question. But I can edit Sony RAW on my humble laptop without massive issues, even if it fully utilizes the hardware, which might not be able to handle much higher frame rates.
BTW, R3D in 8K is even more demanding and is fully loading all CPU cores plus 75% of the GPU. It's pretty much the same in 18.6.6 and 19.1.1, just barely playing R3D in 24 fps smoothly on my laptop.

I'm sorry but I think it's bad compatibility with Windows 11. After reinstalling my PC to Windows 11 (I didn't change the hardware) I have problems with playback on timeline. Although it shows me that the image is running at 24 fps and is in the green, unfortunately the image is not smooth My PC: RTX 4090, 64GB RAM, Intel 13th 13900K, On Windows 10 it did not do this and the playback was absolutely smooth. It doesn't matter what video or what codec I load into davinci resolve Playback is not smooth even though Davinci Resolcve tells me to.

Hello. So I've figured out how to eliminate the smoothness of the video preview. As I mentioned before, after installing the new Windows 11, I have a problem with the preview video in Davinci Resolve that the preview is not smooth even when the light above the 24p video preview window is green (when I am working in 24p). On Windows 10 I had both my 4K Dell monitors set to 60 Hz. In Davinci Resolve it was always set the same way, whether I was doing a DNG video at 24 fps or Braw at 25 fps it was always a smooth preview. After installing the new Win 11 24h2 a month ago the smooth preview is not. I found that you can enable smooth preview in Win 11 in Davinci Resolve by changing the monitor frequency to the frequency you have set in Davinci Resolve. I'm working with DNG RAW files from film scanners and it's bugging me a bit. Isn't it possible to modify Davinci Resolve to work like it does on Win 10? I don't have this problem in any other program. Neither in After Effects nor in Premiere. What's the problem?

it shows me that the image is running at 24 fps and is in the green, unfortunately the image is not smooth

That FPS reading can 'lie' to you unless you go into the Timeline Viewer menu and check the option to Show All Video Frames.

I recommend leaving that on at all times, but definitely for any performance testings purposes.

Following, because my RTX 3090 Ti with driver version 560.94 is struggling as well (after clean install Windows 10 Enterprise)

Same here -- Since 19.1 and beyond with latest drivers playback is choppy and stuttery, along with other graphics UI glitches. GPU A6000.

This was my resolution:
Update NVIDA Studio Drivers. I'm now on v. 566.36 (Dec 10, 2024 release date) and my playback went from unusable to perfect.

I came across this thread after experiencing the same issue with choppy playback and have tried all of the advice I could find online.

Now, one change seems to have resolved the issue for me which I didn't see mentioned in the previous posts, so thought I'd share in case it helps anyone else.

I'm on a fairly old laptop:

• Windows 11 24H2
• Intel i5-11300H
• 32GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with Studio Driver 566.36

To solve the choppiness problem, I had to set DaVinci Resolve 19 to specifically run using the GPU and not the on-board Intel graphics.

You can do this by:

1. Right-click your desktop and select Display settings
2. Find Related settings and click Graphics
3. Under Custom settings for applications check that DaVinci Resolve is not already appearing in this list
4. Click Add desktop app and navigate to the DaVinci Resolve installation and select Resolve.exe
5. DaVinci Resolve should now appear in the applications list. Select it to expand it.
6. Under GPU preference select High Performance (or whichever option is for your dedicated GPU)

No idea if this will help anyone or if it's even the right approach, but this solved my issue so hope it's helpful for at least one other person.

I wouldn't have found this solution if it weren't for reading the responses to this thread, so I appreciate all the help from the community.

I have fixed the non-smooth playback in Windows 11 Just turn off Harwer acceleration in Windows 11 (careful not in NVIDIA settings but in Windows) How? :
- Right-click your desktop and select Display settings
- Find Related settings and click Graphics.
- Under Graphics click on Advanced Graphics settings and turn off Hardware Acceleration there.
On my RTX 4090, playback on the main and secondary monitors is absolutely smooth Both in Davinci Resolve and in the MPC-HC player.

I hope this helps someone as much as it did me

Have a great day, everyone.