DaVinci Resolve System Requirements

DaVinci Resolve is the NLE and color grading software of choice for many creators. Not all of us have the best hardware, so what works and what doesn’t?

As with all things tech, change comes quickly. Resolve 16 is out, and I originally started compiling this guide in 2015 with Resolve 11. However, most of the emails I receive are from would-be Resolve users that don’t have the budget to build a monster workstation. The questions I get are from people that want to know more about the minimum DaVinci Resolve system requirements rather than the ideal system we would all have if money was no object.

I’m a CSI (Colorist Society International) colorist and have been involved with Resolve both as a user, and consultant to post production companies for many years. I deal with high-end systems all the time. However, I feel there’s not a lot of information available about DaVinci Resolve minimum system requirements, yet that’s what many new users and content creators want to know. So while I started this article in 2015, the general points are just as valid as they were years ago.

First things first, you can download the latest DaVinci Resolve 15 configuration guide here. It’s worth looking at the recommended configurations listed in the guide as a starting point.

  

DaVinci Resolve System Requirements

DaVinci Resolve is an amazing and powerful piece of software, however just installing the software doesn’t constitute a workable system. Resolve is one of the most resource intensive applications you can use and will bring any unprepared system to its knees. This being said, some things are more important than others depending on what work you will be doing, and you may be able to coax your PC into running Resolve fairly happily just by upgrading your GPU and using some of Resolve’s built in media optimization tools.

If you’re just looking for some good GPU options, I’ve put a DaVinci Resolve GPU list with purchase links (updated late 2019) at the end of this article.

The point is not to call you out about your hardware, but to help you understand there are some minimum requirements if you want to get the most out of Resolve.

Below is a summary of some minimum DaVinci Resolve system requirements you need to be aiming for.

A decent Intel Core i7 CPU is a minimum, but Core i9, AMD Ryzen or AMD Threadripper are the best choices. If you plan on using H.264 / AVC and HEVC camera media, your CPU may be doing the decoding before your GPU even gets involved.

Read more about this in my article XAVC / XAVC-S / H.264 / HEVC and DaVinci Resolve.

At least 16GB system RAM is a minimum for any laptop or desktop you are considering. I recommend 32GB.

Invest in your GPU, it’s probably the single most important component for Resolve (as long as the above two points are met). I would recommend looking for a GPU with at least 4GB dedicated memory, whether it’s a mobile GPU in a laptop, or a desktop card but 6GB, 8GB + won’t hurt.

If you are looking at a laptop, you can expand your GPU power by plugging in an external eGPU over Thunderbolt 3.

Read more about this in my article The Best DaVinci Resolve eGPU Options.

Storage bandwidth is important. Check the data rate requirements of the media you plan to use with Resolve and make sure you’ve got storage fast enough to deliver those data rates in real time.

Your desktop screen or monitor is not the best way to monitor for color. When you’re ready to step up your grading game, you should consider a separate video output interface (this can be a card, or an external Thunderbolt interface) and a calibrated reference monitor.

Read more about Resolve monitoring in my article Low Budget Resolve Monitoring and Video Color Management.

Getting the Most from Resolve on Limited Hardware

It’s important to consider your expectations and real world needs. For most of us there is little real need for real-time 4K playback unless you’re monitoring in 4K. Even if your media is 4K or higher and you intend to render at 4K, you can easily edit in an HD resolution timeline and make far more efficient use of your system resources where real-time playback is essential.

Of course 4K monitoring is becoming more of a trend, and I’ve put together an article outlining exactly how you can put together calibrated and color managed external monitoring for DaVinci Resolve in HD or 4K on a budget using a LG C9 OLED TV.

                             

Proxies and Timeline Resolution

One of the most useful features of Resolve is how quickly you can change timeline resolution non destructively. For example, as long as your source media is UHD, you can drop your timeline resolution to HD for editing and your clips will be resampled down to HD for better playback. You can switch your timeline resolution back to UHD at any time and the clips will read at the full native UHD resolution. In addition, for RAW media formats you can change decode or playback debayer resolution. This means you can drop your resolution and debayer quality temporarily to ensure playback performance while you’re editing, and then ramp it back up for grading where real-time playback is perhaps not so critical.

Resolve Optimized Media and Render Cache

In situations where dropping debayer quality and/or timeline resolution still doesn’t result in real-time playback on a particular system (most likely a laptop), there are a couple of ways to handle it. One way is to have Resolve create Optimized Media. Optimized Media files are lower resolution, compressed proxies (copies) of your high resolution camera source files. These temporary files are entirely handled by Resolve and can work very well for your edit, you can then relink to your original full res camera files for grading and delivery.

Resolve’s Render Cache is also a very useful tool enabling a background render of a particular shot, sequence, or even an entire timeline to a intermediary codec to ensure real-time playback.

                           

It’s ALL About The GPU

In any entry level Resolve system, your GPU is everything! It is more important than your CPU or system RAM (both of which should be up to the task too). This article assumes a single GPU for the purposes of looking at minimum requirements. However, the more GPU’s in the system, the more benefit you’ll see from a faster CPU also.

DaVinci Resolve offloads intensive image processing to the GPU. It also employs YRGB 32-bit floating point processing for exceptional color precision.

Ideally, in a desktop PC, this should be a dedicated GPU just for image processing in addition to the graphics card running your desktop GUI (user interface). In the case that you are using a laptop or any system with a single, or integrated GPU you can still run Resolve, but performance will be compromised compared to a dual or multi-GPU system.

If you’re investing in a laptop, I highly recommend making sure you choose one with Thunderbolt 3 ports so you have the option of running an external GPU. Read more about this in my article The Best DaVinci Resolve eGPU Options.

I’ve listed some purchase links to some good GPU options at various budget levels at the end of this article. The NVIDIA GPU’s listed are all NVIDIA Turing architecture and will give you GPU decoding of AVC / H.264 / HEVC media in DaVinci Resolve Studio.

                   

GPU Memory

Of course GPU cores matter, but GPU memory matters more when looking at minimum requirements.

512MB ? Forget about it.

1GB ? You’ll be okay with basic HD ProRes work, checking RAW files but avoid noise reduction and optical flow.

1.5GB ? Approaching the absolute minimum to use Resolve with some level of complexity in HD. Noise reduction and optical flow will still be problematic. I’ve made a 1.5GB Intel Iris Pro GPU work well on a iMac and Macbook Pro, and manage to render a full 4K delivery.

2GB ? A comfortable HD experience, limited 4K work.

4GB ? Minimum for comfortable 4K work.

6GB ? You can tackle pretty much everything a project is likely to require.

8GB+ ? You can actually tackle everything any project is likely to require.

Bottom line, if you’re looking at a new system on a budget and you’re working mostly in HD, I’d recommend an absolute minimum of 2GB GPU memory, really 4GB is a more realistic minimum. The more plugins you want to use, the more GPU memory you need. Performance also depends on the resolution of your media, the resolution of your timeline and the codecs of the media you are using.

                   

Storage Speed

The next biggest issue is how fast Resolve can read media from your storage. Expecting real-time playback performance with heavy high res media stored on a single internal spinning hard disk just isn’t going to work. It’s completely impossible because the per second read requirement of your media is higher than the disk can provide.

If you’re considering a laptop, make sure it has SSD or PCIe flash storage, or connect fast external media storage via Thunderbolt or at least USB 3.

SSD, PCIe drives and spinning disk RAID arrays are all great solutions. Using an internal SSD or two in a RAID 0 configuration is a good start on a small scale, but you’ll have limited total capacity. External SSD’s provided they are Thunderbolt or at least USB 3 can also work.

When buying external hard drives, keep in mind just because an external hard drive says it is Thunderbolt or USB 3, does not mean the actual drive inside supports the full data rate of the interface.

New RAW codecs such as Apple ProRes RAW and Blackmagic RAW promise raw quality at lower bit rates. This is exciting, but regardless of codec improvements, fast storage is your best friend.

External desktop Thunderbolt RAID arrays are perfect solutions for a single system, or you can configure a RAID internally as long as your system chassis has at least four drive bays free and you have a motherboard supporting hardware RAID, or a PCIe slot free for a dedicated RAID controller card.

                       

General Considerations

Generally speaking, when looking at entry level DaVinci Resolve system requirements, your GPU and storage are the primary key factors you have to address. Secondary to that, your CPU and system RAM are also important, you should be on 16GB of system RAM at least, 32GB is recommended.

For further reading, I highly recommend you take a look at Recommended PC Hardware for DaVinci Resolve on the Puget Systems website. You’ll find some helpful information there. I also recommend their turnkey systems.

                                   

Monitoring and Color Management

Monitoring and color management is another very important part of any color grading setup. I’ve compiled a guide to building your own color managed and calibrated monitoring pipeline based around the excellent LG OLED TV’s. They can be perfectly calibrated for Rec.709 color correction and grading work.

You can add precision calibrated monitoring to your Resolve system for only $2200 ? $3000 depending on whether you need to monitor in HD or UHD 4K.

Read more about Resolve monitoring in my article Low Budget Resolve Monitoring and Video Color Management.

DaVinci Resolve System Requirements FAQ

What is the first thing I should upgrade to improve my system performance in DaVinci Resolve?

The first thing you should consider is your GPU. Other components might be limiting your playback performance, or how quickly you can export videos but your GPU will determine if Resolve will run at all on your system, and how complex your color correction can be.

What is most important when looking at GPU options for DaVinci Resolve?

The most important specification to look at is how much memory the GPU has. Regardless of how many processing cores, it’s video memory that limits the resolution you can work in, the number of correction nodes you can use, and the performance of memory intensive plugins and effects such as noise reduction.

Are GPU cores important for DaVinci Resolve?

The number of GPU cores will determine how quickly a GPU can process image data. When considering a GPU under 4GB, memory is a more important factor than GPU cores. For GPU’s with more than 4GB memory you can consider memory and number of GPU cores equally when making a decision which GPU to buy.

I have only 8GB of system RAM. Should I buy a GPU or more system memory?

This is a tough choice because in this case, really you should do both. If you can only afford to buy more RAM or a new GPU then the best decision depends on your existing GPU. If your existing GPU has at least 2GB video memory then it’s better to buy more system RAM. However if your GPU has only 1GB or 1.5GB video memory, or is a integrated GPU that shares your system memory than a new GPU is the best decision. Either way, whichever one you don’t upgrade right away should be your next upgrade.

My video files won’t play back smoothly in DaVinci Resolve. What should I do?

The most likely reason your video files aren’t playing smoothly is because they are H.264 / AVC or H.265 / HEVC encoded files. DaVinci Resolve may be relying on your system CPU to decode these complex video files before handing over uncompressed image data to your GPU. Read more about this in my article XAVC / XAVC-S / H.264 / HEVC and DaVinci Resolve. It’s likely that your CPU is the bottleneck if these video files are not playing back smoothly. The solution is to decrease the timeline resolution to HD if you are working with 4K video files, and to create optimized media or use render cache on your timeline.

What codec should I choose for DaVinci Resolve’s optimized media and render cache?

If you’re on a Mac, I recommend choosing HD resolution Apple ProRes 422 for both optimized media and render cache. If you’re using a Windows PC, I recommend choosing HD resolution Avid DNxHR HQ for your optimized media and render cache. Both of these codecs are high quality and far less complex to decode. Choose a fast internal or external hard drive as the destination for your optimized media and cache files.

                                             

DaVinci Resolve 16 On A 2015 Macbook Pro

I have Resolve 16 running on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 16GB system RAM and integrated Intel Iris Pro graphics that has access to 1.5GB of shared system memory.

However, I wouldn’t recommend it.

So far, it’s still working well enough on HD resolution timelines, even using both the FilmConvert OFX plugin and Neat Video OFX plugin. I have yet to see a GPU out of memory error, however I keep my grades fairly simple and straightforward. I could definitely provoke an out of memory message without much effort.

On this system I’m making use of either optimized media or render cache for everything, every clip on the timeline. This is time consuming but the only way I have real-time playback of H.264/AVC media on this aging laptop.

Many creators are just starting out with Resolve, learning to color grade, and working with what they have, so I want to put it out there that this older Macbook Pro is running Resolve 16, even with some OFX plugins and still chugging along.

Please don’t hesitate to comment with your questions either here, on Youtube, or hit me up on twitter, I will always reply.

                  

Buying A New GPU for DaVinci Resolve

If you’re interested in purchasing a new GPU for your PC. I’ve listed some good options below (as of late 2019) at different budget levels. Please consider purchasing through my affiliate links (if available). It costs you nothing but helps me create more content.

NVIDIA

The NVIDIA GPU’s listed below are all NVIDIA Turing architecture and will give you GPU decoding of AVC / H.264 / HEVC media in DaVinci Resolve Studio on Windows. This is a big enough reason alone to purchase Resolve Studio.

NVIDIA Titan RTX 24GB (USD $2500 Budget)

ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11G Turbo Edition (USD $1200 Budget)

MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER 8GB (USD $750 Budget)

MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB (USD $500 Budget)

MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB (USD $400 Budget)

MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 2060 8GB (USD $350 Budget)

AMD

XFX Radeon VII 16GB (USD $600 Budget)

MSI Gaming Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB (USD $450 Budget)

MSI Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB (USD $370 Budget)

https://www.richardlackey.com/davinci-resolve-system-requirements-a-reality-check/#