What H.264 and H.265 Hardware Decoding is Supported in DaVinci Resolve Studio?

Introduction

The Studio version of DaVinci Resolve has long been able to utilize hardware decoding of H.264 and H.256 (HEVC) media to greatly improve performance, but unfortunately, not all types of H.264 and H.265 media are supported. On top of the codec itself, both the bit depth (8-bit, 10-bit, etc.) and chroma subsampling (4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4), as well as the hardware capabilities of your system, impacts whether you will be able to utilize hardware decoding.

We were unable to find complete documentation on which H.264/5 variants have hardware decoding support in DaVinci Resolve Studio, so we decided to do our own testing to find out. If you want to test your own system, we also have instructions and media download in the Run this Test on your System (Windows) section.

If you are looking for similar information for Premiere Pro, check out our What H.264/H.265 Hardware Decoding is Supported in Premiere Pro? article.

Hardware Decoding Support in DaVinci Resolve Studio

Discrete GPU (AMD/Intel/NVIDIA)

Integrated Graphics (Intel/AMD)

Determining Your H.264/5 Media Type

If you are not sure what bit depth or chroma subsampling your media is, the easiest and most accurate way is to install a program called MediaInfo. Note: you will typically need to switch to the “Tree” or another detailed view to see this information.

Run this Test on your System (Windows)

If you want to test your own system to see what flavors of H.264/H.265 your system is able to use hardware decoding for, you can download our test assets:

Resolve Hardware Decoding Assets

This test method will automatically record the render speed for each codec flavor and requires you to manually enabled/disable hardware decoding in the DaVinci Resolve preferences. Since many modern CPUs can brute force their way through processing even tough codecs, the .bat file used to run the renders includes limiting Resolve to use only a single CPU core. Because of this, it is not a good test for determining system performance when working with each codec variation, but does work well to determine when hardware decoding is functioning or not.

Instructions:

1. Run “Trancode.bat” to generate the various flavors of H.264 and H.265 inside the “Media” folder
2. Launch DaVinci Resolve manually
3. Ensure hardware decoding is enabled in the preferences through “DaVinci Resolve->Preferences->Decode Options”
4. Close Resolve
5. Run the “Render_Affinity.bat” file. This will launch DaVinci Resolve, limit it to use only a single CPU core, perform a basic export of each codec, and log the performance in FPS
6. In the “Render” folder, rename the “RenderTiming.csv” file to “Decoding_on.csv”
7. Launch DaVinci Resolve manually
8. Ensure hardware decoding is DISABLED in the preferences through “DaVinci Resolve->Preferences->Decode Options”
9. Close Resolve
10. Run the “Render_Affinity.bat” file.
11. Compare the results in the new “RenderTiming.csv” file in the “Render” folder to the “Decoding_on.csv” copy from when hardware decoding was enabled. For any codec flavor where the performance is significantly higher with HW decoding enabled, that is proof that it is functional for that codec. Typically, a performance of 1.5x or more indicates functioning HW decoding.
12. Re-launch DaVinci Resolve and re-enable hardware decoding in the preferences through “DaVinci Resolve->Preferences->Decode Options”

Update Log

11/5/2024
Added AMD Ryzen 7000/9000 series
Added Intel Core Ultra 200
Split apart tables for discrete GPU and integrated graphics
Updated test directions to utilize export results to compare performance rather than trying to use Windows Task Manager, which can be unreliable

12/15/2022
Added AMD Radeon 7000 series.
Consolidated Radeon 5000/6000/7000, NVIDIA RTX 20/30/40-series, and Intel Quick Sync 11/12/13th Gen entries to save on space.

9/22/2022
Added NVIDIA RTX 40 series. NVIDIA has confirmed that the NVDEC is the same 5th generation found on the RTX 30 series.