DaVinci Resolve Studio – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Performance

Introduction

NVIDIA has a long history of releasing "Ti" variants of their products which in most cases are simply slight upgrades to the base model. With the recent launch of the RTX 3080 Ti (and RTX 3070 Ti), NVIDIA is continuing this trend. Compared to the base RTX 3080, the new RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM (12GB versus 10GB) and 18% more CUDA cores, although the maximum boost clock is a bit lower. In fact, in terms of performance, the RTX 3080 Ti should be closer to the RTX 3090 than it is to the RTX 3080.

DaVinci Resolve is known in the industry as having excellent GPU-acceleration support – greatly benefiting from powerful (or multiple powerful) video cards. This makes it a very interesting application to look at for the RTX 3080 Ti since Resolve should benefit from the extra performance of this card more than any other NLE.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

As we noted earlier, the RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080 and has close to the same CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3080, or $300 less than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need high GPU performance, but not necessarily the large 24GB of VRAM that is found on the RTX 3090.

One concern we have is that this is a 350W card – just like the RTX 3090 – but uses a 2-slot cooler that is essentially the same as what is on the lower wattage RTX 3080. In our testing, this makes it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of June 8th, 2021

To test each GPU, we will be using the fastest platform currently available for DaVinci Resolve – most notably the AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX. Since Premiere Pro utilizes the CPU so heavily, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at its fullest potential.

For the testing itself, we will be using the 0.92.1 version of our PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve benchmark. If you wish to run our benchmark yourself, you can download the benchmark and compare your results to thousands of user-submitted results in our PugetBench database.

We will be using the "Extended" preset that includes both 4K, 8K media as well as specific GPU Effects and Fusion tests. Using 8K media with most of these GPUs is actually not a good idea as we generally recommend 20GB+ of VRAM when working with 8K media in Resolve, but our benchmark does not load the Resolve UI which means that the VRAM load is much lower; allowing GPUs with just 8GB of VRAM to successfully complete the 8K tests.

Raw Benchmark Results

While we are going to go through our analysis of the testing in the next section, we always like to provide the raw results for those that want to dig into the details. If there is a specific task you tend to perform in your workflow, examining the raw results is going to be much more applicable than our more general analysis.

Overall DaVinci Resolve Studio Performance Analysis

While many reviewers like to solely look at things like temporal noise reduction (often to an unrealistic degree) or OpenFX that heavily utilize the GPU, we first want to start off by looking at the overall performance we saw from our DaVinci Resolve benchmark with each GPU in order to show what most users would likely experience in their day-to-day work.

Looking at the Overall Score, it is interesting to see that the RTX 3080, 3080 Ti, and 3090 all effectively perform the same. In fact, in the 4K and 8K media tests, these three cards were within 2% of each other which is well within the margin of error. It is really only the GPU effects tests (which we will look at more closely in the next section) that we see much of a performance delta between these cards.

All in all, this means that for general editing and light color grading, you likely won't notice much of a difference between the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3080. However, the Overall Score includes the performance for a number of tests that can be CPU bound. To get a better idea of the maximum performance difference between these cards, we should hone in on the "GPU Effects" portion of our benchmark which looks at tasks like TNR and various GPU-accelerated OpenFX.

GPU Score Analysis

The GPU effects portion of our benchmark looks at the performance of individual GPU-accelerated effects such as temporal noise reduction, film grain, lens blur, optical flow, face refinement, and more. In our testing, these effects easily show the largest benefit from having a powerful GPU, which means that they should give us the best look at the maximum performance gain you may encounter from each of the GPUs we are testing.

In this case, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti shows a nice 12% bump in performance over the RTX 3080 and only falls behind the RTX 3090 by a small 3%. This can make it a terrific choice if you use a number of OpenFX or noise reduction on 4K timelines where you don't need the 24GB of VRAM on the RTX 3090.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti perform in DaVinci Resolve Studio?

Overall, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a solid GPU for DaVinci Resolve. For the tasks that rely heavily on the GPU (primarily noise reduction and OpenFX), it can be up to 12% faster than the RTX 3080, and only trails behind the more expensive RTX 3090 by a few percent. The biggest downside to the RTX 3080 Ti is that it is simply a hot-running card. That shouldn't be a problem if you are only using a single GPU, but for those that want to have dual GPUs, you are going to need very good chassis airflow to keep this card under control.

The price of the RTX 3080 Ti is certainly not cheap, however, and many users may opt to pay the extra $300 to go straight up to the RTX 3090 which has twice the VRAM (24GB vs 12GB) and a more powerful cooler. 12GB of VRAM should be plenty for 4K workflows, but if you want to be able to go up to 8K, 12GB isn't going to cut it in DaVinci Resolve and you would need to upgrade to the RTX 3090 24GB. Because of this, going with the top-of-the-line RTX 3090 24GB in order to help future-proof your system is not a terrible idea if you have the budget for it.

As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for DaVinci Resolve Studio. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by "Video Card") for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.