Resolve 12 Extremely Slow Win10

Hello everyone. I have been having some extreme slowdown issues with Resolve 12, after speaking with BlackMagic Support who basically told me it's tough, I've decided to reach out to the community.

The message I originally sent to BM follows:

I recently updated both my OS from Windows 7 to Windows 10, as recomended by Resolve 12 which I also just updated from Resolve 11. I have been experiencing extremely slow playback speed. Regardless of format, in fact even if I place nothing on the timeline but audio. I still get choppy playback.

I've tried CinemaDNG 4K RAW footage (from BM Production Camera), RED footage, Prores HQ and 422 footage in both 1080p and UHD. All of which playback extremely slowly in the edit room. Most of the time the image stays completely still and I just get choppy audio.

I've tried every setting I can possibly imagine would make a difference from debayer quality, resize filter to timeline resolution. Nothing makes a difference.

I tried caching in various different formats. Still slow to no playback in the edit room.

If I switch over to colour, things get better but still pretty bad. Prores sees maybe 14-20 fps and RAW sees maybe 8-10. The cached RAW clips playback at around 20, where as in Windows 7 and Resolve 12 I was getting 24 full speed (running a GTX 750, 8gb RAM) on both. The timeline is set at 1920x1080.

Surely I am missing something.

My current system specs are as follows:
AMD FX 8320 8Core
16GB RAM
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 OC 4GB
Editing from a Sandisk Extreme PRO 480GB SSD

All other software such as Premiere PRO and VLC plays this footage back perfectly.

Monitoring shows that while playing back in Resolve, no more than 8.5GB of RAM is ever used, no more than 1.5GB VRAM is ever used. The GPU load spikes between 0% and 20% and CPU load is at about 85%-95%.

The GPU is recognised in the preferences window.

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Blackmagic Support suggested I roll back to R11 to diagnose. In R11 everything played back perfectly, 4K RAW CinemaDNG played back in full quality on a 1080p timeline at 24fps.

After this I was told they couldn't resolve the issue as they dont test resolve on any AMD board and cannot guarantee performance. This is an unnacceptable response in my eyes. Essentially telling me to either use R11 or go build another machine they recommend in their guide.

I'd really appreciate any help anyone could provide since I've exhausted my knowledge trying to fix this.

Note. I'm using Resolve 12 Studio.

Thank you,

Nathan

Could it be the version of Windows 10 installed? DR 12 requires Window 10 PRO. That could be your issue.

Ah yes, sorry I forgot to mention that I do have Windows 10 Pro installed.

Hard to say but some thoughts/things I would check...

1. 85-95% of your cpu is very high. If you reboot, then give windows a couple minutes to get all of its background services/apps running...without launching any programs, check the task manager...what does your cpu run at without anything actively running?

2. If it stays in the single digits then I'd fire up Resolve and watch your performance monitors. Do you see any weird disk activity? Does anything unexpected spike and/or stay high?

3. In Resolve, do you have your scratch disk set to the SSD? Or is pointed to a spinning disk?

4. How long ago did you upgrade to Win10? Did you do a new install or a Win7 to Win10 upgrade? If it's a fairly new install, maybe Windows is indexing your drives, which will cost you in both disk performance as well as cpu cycles.

Hopefully some that is helpful to get ya started!

Good luck!

Thanks for the reply.

The CPU idles between 0% and 1%. It stays this way during launch of Resolve 12.

The SSD is set as scratch disk. But there are also 4 HDD's on the list. With the SSD at the top.

I rolled back to Resolve 11 to quickly get a project out of the way. Throughout the entire process everything worked fine. Realtime playback both in edit and colour, even with various nodes applied to each shot and NR on one of them. I can't understand what is so different in R12 to be causing such a performance drop.

A nice writeup on improving Resolve 12 performance.

http://timeinpixels.com/2015/08/how-to- ... rformance/

Thanks for sharing the link.

I've actually been through each of the steps outlined in the writeup before. None of which made any difference.

Like I said before, even if I place nothing in the timeline but audio, I'm still getting bad playback. Yet in R11 everything works smoothly. Which indicates to me there is something else causing the issue.

Now here is a very weird development...

I just started messing around again trying out various different footage on the timeline. So the choppy playback was happening again when I opened up the task manager to check on the system usage. As soon as the task manager opened up. Instantly I get smooth playback at 24fps. It will stay this way for about 30-40 seconds playing through perfectly with colour nodes enabled on each clip before it starts to stutter again. So I open up the task manager again and boom. Smooth playback.

This happens consistently, everytime I bring up the task manager.

I am completely at a loss to explain this. What could happening when the task manager opens up that seems to kick the software back into place?

Thanks for all the help, so far. Maybe we might be getting somewhere with this.

I'm having similar slow results with a pretty solid Windows 10 system. Thought perhaps it was just the free version of Resolve 12, but I got my dongle for Studio today and my second (GTX 970) GPU does nothing. Making proxies or using footage shot on the BMPCC in ProRes is no better than h.264 footage. Resolve 11 played everything back in near realtime.

I can confirm that opening the task manager speeds things up. At least it did the first time- suddenly I had a 4K H.264 clip playing in real time. Next few times, not so much.

Ah! So this isn't an issue specific to me. Well lets hope somebody can shed some light on this.

Same here

I used to not have any issues even on my laptop and now it's just buggy

Even converting to dnxhd does nothing to alleviate the issue.

Ironically it seem to be more of a decoding issue since the actual color controls/gpu function fine

I had also downgraded to v11 just to make sure I wasn't going crazy and to my surprise everything was working fine!

Very weird, but to be expected with such a new release of both OS And Resolve, I suppose

Sent from my Z970 using Tapatalk

So at the very least, a few people are experiencing this issue. Which indicates to me it is an issue. That should be resolved. Not an issue specific to me leading BM to pretty much tell me "tough". Which was a surprising shame because I've thus far received exellent support and am a lover/supporter of their products.

Hopefully somebody has found a resolution and could share it with us. I'll keep trying, I think I'll give BM a call tommorrow and ask for help directly over the phone.

OK everybody. I've fixed it, and the fix is far simpler than it should be. I'm kicking myself I didn't try it sooner.

Simply run Resolve as an administrator. As in actually right click the icon and run as administrator. I just checked the box in the properties window so each time I run resolve it runs as an admin.

I guess Windows 10 was crippling Resolves ability to write data which caused a bottleneck somewhere. Anyway, I'd like to know if this works for anyone else. Thanks

I just tried running it as Administrator versus not, and it's having no effect for me. I can get full 24p playback on some ProRes footage in the timeline for 7 seconds and then it just slows down to nothing. It's a consistent 7 seconds, and then nothing unless I shut down Resolve and start it up again.

So am I, running on 5820K + 16g ram + K620, all media from BMPCC prores 422 on ssd with win 10 pro.
Best guess I can get is quicktime on win 10 sucks which cause prores decode very hard for resolve.
so currently back to win7+resolve 11

I found that Windows Defender / Security essentials absolutely killed the Resolve performance in Windows 10 Pro.
With the Real time protection on, I couldn't get over 30MB/s read speed on my raid.

I've been cutting a short in Resolve 12 today and throughout it has been a pleasant process. Perfect playback from start to finish. So for the sake of diagnostics I ran Resolve again, but this time I made sure I wasn't running as administrator.

Immediately the problems bagan again. So for me, it is definitely something to do with the administrator rights/permission. I think resolve is trying to write data but is being crippled somewhere.

If your still having issues try allowing all Resolves permissions.

Right click the resolve icon. Click properties then the Security tab. Click Edit.

Change all permissions, under all group names to Allow.

I'll admit if running as an administrator didn't do the trick, it is unlikely this will, but always worth a try.

I think I found what it was on my system! I unchecked Compatability Mode (Windows 8) on Resolve, which I guess was set by default, and now it's flying! Even 4K H.264 stuff is playing at a decent enough rate to edit with.

I wonder if it's because Resolve 11 was first installed before I upgraded to Windows 10. Hope this helps someone else.

OK everybody. I've fixed it, and the fix is far simpler than it should be. I'm kicking myself I didn't try it sooner.

Simply run Resolve as an administrator.

Thank you so much Nathan. That fixed it for me too. I was pulling my hair out for hours wondering what had happened. I was running UHD ProRes fine on Win10 and then today it just crapped-out on me. I changed Resolves compatibilitymode late one night a couple of days ago to run as Win8.1 (to hopefully gain some performance)...totally forgot about it. I just went through an afternoon of pain.

Thanks for troubleshooting this