DaVinci Resolve & Multi 3090s

Associate
Joined
22 Oct 2006
Posts
1,095
I've posted this in the GPU section but not sure if this is a better forum.

I've swapped from Adobe Premier to DaVinci Resolve Studio as my video editing suite of choice. Steep learning curve but getting there.

Resolve is a beast when it comes to GPU utilisation and with the Studio version you can use multiple GPUs.

I'm running with a single 3090 and was wondering if anyone had tried a 2nd GPU and if so what the real world difference was over a single GPU.

Thanks
 
I've posted this in the GPU section but not sure if this is a better forum.

I've swapped from Adobe Premier to DaVinci Resolve Studio as my video editing suite of choice. Steep learning curve but getting there.

Resolve is a beast when it comes to GPU utilisation and with the Studio version you can use multiple GPUs.

I'm running with a single 3090 and was wondering if anyone had tried a 2nd GPU and if so what the real world difference was over a single GPU.

Thanks

It doesn't scale terribly well, judging by the benchmarks.

I did look into this myself. I'm heavily using DVR Studio for my youtube channel, processing multicam 4k streams, and utilising the upscaling etc which absolutely beasts my machine. But seems it's not worth adding a second really.

I have a 4070 at the moment, and surprisingly from the benchmarks, the 4090 isn't really enough of an uplift to make it worthwhile. I could swap it for 3x 4090s and not even double my performance!
 
Maybe better to look at what it is your asking the gpu to do, and where you're seeking performance improvement. My general understanding is that for the likes of effects, noise reduction, optical flow, etc ... the performance will generally come from how many GPU / CUDA cores you have. For encoding, then the performance comes from the encoder engines within the GPU.

As an example, a 3090 has 1 encoder engine ... and so does a 3080, 3070, 3060. So they would all 'encode' at a similar speed as they all use basically the same engine. However, if you had effects applied, then the 3090 will likely be markedly faster than the 3080 and below due to the higher number of cuda cores and memory which can grunt out the effects calculations before passing them to be encoded.

I used to notice this on my 3080. A simple encode would keep the card quiet. Where affects like nose reduction were applied, then your could hear the card coil whine slightly. It was clearly doing a different task of work to encode with effects.

Would adding a second card allow a second account of CUDA cores and a second encoding engine to be used in parallel? Don't know personally, never tried.

However if you made the jump to a 4070TI or above, then they have 2 encoder engines in them ... I presume DaVinci would be able to use both if they are on the same card. You might drop your encode time a lot, at the possible expense of effects performance. Depends on what you want to improve.


- - - - - - - -

This also seems to be the case with Macs as well in DaVinci .... there is increase in performance with increase of gpu cores, but also big steps in performance where there are additional media encode engines.

For example, M2 Max chip has 2 encode engines, and the M2 Ultra has 4 ... and the Ultra generally shows near double the performance as a result.
 
Last edited:
Just bear in mind, the parallel nvenc encoding only works on h.265 and av1 codecs in Resolve and I believe you have to have the Studio version to enable nvenc.

What are you using Resolve for and what source codecs are you working with and then rendering to?
 
Last edited:
I use the AI sharpening a fair bit which absolutely rinses the GPU, multicam 4k streams in general need a lot of grunt.
You're cutting UHD multicam in Davinci? Also, why would you need to AI sharpen all the ISOs? Surely finish your cut and then AI sharpen the selected camera in your final edit.
 
Back
Top Bottom