The Radeon VII is a very interesting card for DaVinci Resolve due to its 16GB of VRAM which is twice what you would get from a similarly priced NVIDIA GPU. But is it able to keep up in terms of raw performance?


The Radeon VII is a very interesting card for DaVinci Resolve due to its 16GB of VRAM which is twice what you would get from a similarly priced NVIDIA GPU. But is it able to keep up in terms of raw performance?

The new NVIDIA Titan RTX has a stunning 24GB of video memory, making it very attractive for many editors and colorists working with 8K media. But is the extra VRAM all it has going for it or is it also significantly faster than something like the RTX 2080 Ti 11GB?

Unlike most other applications used in the video post-production process, DaVinci Resolve relies much more on the power of your video card(s) than it does on your processor. However, you do need enough CPU power to keep up with your GPU(s) and there are still some aspects of Resolve (like the Fusion tab) where the CPU is more important. In this article, we will be looking at a wide range of processors from Intel and AMD including the Intel 9th Gen, Intel X-series, AMD Ryzen 2nd Gen, and AMD Threadripper 2nd Gen CPU lines. In addition, we will be comparing them to a current Mac Pro 12 Core and iMac Pro 14 Core for those that are curious about how much faster a PC workstation can be compared to a Mac.

DaVinci Resolve is a very GPU-intensive program which limits the amount of performance a higher-end CPU can give you. Depending on the amount of GPU power you have, even a mid-range CPU could perform the same as a more expensive CPU which begs the question: will the new Intel X-series CPUs be any faster than the previous generation?

AMD’s Threadripper 2970WX and 2990WX processors have incredibly high core counts, but often give low performance when running applications that cannot effectively use all their cores. The new “Local Dynamic Mode” is meant to help alleviate some of these issues, but will it actually help video editing applications like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve?

Blackmagic has not made any announcements about DaVinci Resolve supporting NVLink, but we decided to try it out to see what happens. Unfortunately, you need to enable SLI in order for NVLink to work on the GeForce RTX cards which results in some major performance issues.

DaVinci Resolve heavily leverages the GPU to improve performance which means that the new RTX cards should give excellent performance. This article is a follow-up to the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti testing we did recently and adds results for the RTX 2070 8GB card.

Intel’s new 9th Gen Core Processors include both a small frequency bump and an increase in core count. Due to these improvements, these CPUs fare extremely well in video editing applications, performing close to 20% faster than the i7 8700K in many Adobe applications.

DaVinci Resolve is a very GPU-intensive program, but that doesn’t mean that the CPU doesn’t matter. Depending on the amount of GPU power you have, even a mid-range CPU could perform the same as a more expensive CPU which makes the new 9th Gen CPUs from Intel very interesting for Resolve workstations with only a few GPUs.

The new RTX series from NVIDIA may not be great for Adobe applications, but they are great for DaVinci Resolve and are very interesting cards for the future due to two major new features: Tensor cores and RT cores.