DaVinci Resolve 15: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Performance

Introduction

In many ways, DaVinci Resolve is the poster child for how video editing applications should leverage the power of the GPU. While other core components like the CPU are certainly important, if you want the best FPS possible while color grading, a significant portion of your workstation budget will likely be spent on either a single powerful GPU or multiple GPUs.

NVIDIA's new RTX series cards are especially interesting since not only should they perform extremely well from the get-go, DaVinci Resolve is listed as already implementing (or planning to implement) the new features found on the RTX platform by using "Turing Tensor Cores in Resolve 15 to accelerate AI inferencing for graphics enhancement". This is a fairly generic bit of text, and it really only makes sense if you understand the two major new features found in these RTX cards: Tensor cores and RT cores.

What are Tensor Cores?

While already available on the more expensive Titan V GPU, the RTX line introduces tensor cores at a more reasonable price point. These tensor cores operate alongside the normal CUDA cores that traditionally do the heavy lifting, but are designed specifically for machine learning inference (running already created and trained machine learning models). Blackmagic has already announced that they will be using these cores, but exactly how they do so and where exactly it will improve performance is still to be seen.

What are RT Cores?

RT cores are brand new in this generation of graphics cards, and are specialized for a single type of operation: ray tracing. It is possible that Blackmagic may utilize these cores for ray tracing in the Fusion tab, but if or when they will take advantage of these RT cores is currently unknown.

If you would like to skip over our test setup and benchmark result/analysis sections, feel free to jump right to the Conclusion section.

Test Setup & Methodology

Listed below are the test platforms we will be using in our testing:

To see how the new RTX cards and the RTX 2070 in particular perform in DaVinci Resolve, we tested it against a selection of cards from NVIDIA as well as AMD's Vega 64 GPU.

Our testing for DaVinci Resolve primarily revolves around the Color tab and focuses on the minimum FPS you would see with various media and levels of grading. The lowest level of grading we test is simply a basic correction using the color wheels plus 4 Power Window nodes with motion tracking. The next level up is the same adjustments but with the addition of 3 OpenFX nodes: Lens Flare, Tilt-Shift Blur, and Sharpen. The final level has all of the previous nodes plus one TNR node.

We kept our project timelines at Ultra HD (3840×2160) across all the tests, but changed the playback framerate to match the FPS of the media. For all the difficult RAW footage we tested (CinemaDNG & RED), we not only tested with the RAW decode quality set to "Full Res" but we also tested at "Half Res" ("Half Res Good" for the RED footage). Full resolution decoding should show the largest performance delta between the different cards, but we also want to see what kind of FPS increase you might see by running at a lower decode resolution.

With the addition of the "Fusion" tab in Resolve, we are also going to be including some basic tests for that tab as well. At the moment these are relatively easy projects that specifically test things like particles with a turbulence node, planar tracking, compositing, and 3D text with a heavy gaussian blur node. These projects are based on the following tutorials:

• The Post Color Blog – Composite a new phone screen in Davinci Resolve and Fusion!
• VDV Productions – 3D Dancing Text Animation with light rays | DaVinci Resolve 15 & Fusion Tutorial
• Chetal Gazdar – Blackmagic Design Fusion Tutorial: Golden Dust Particles

If you have suggestions on what we should test in the future, please let us know in the comments section. Especially if you are able to send us a sample project to use, we really want to hear from you!

Color Tab FPS – Raw Benchmark Results

Color Tab FPS – Benchmark Analysis

To analyze our benchmark results, we are going to break it down based the three different levels of color grading we tested. The easiest – a basic grade with 4 power windows – is not too difficult and every GPU we tested should be able to give full playback FPS in everything but RED 8K (Full Res Premium). However, each level up should show more and more of a difference between the different cards.

The "Score" shown in the charts is a representation of the average performance we saw with each GPU for that test. In essence, a score of "80" means that on average, the card was able to play our project at 80% of the tested media's FPS. A perfect score would be "100" which would mean that the system gave full FPS even with the most difficult codecs and grades.

In terms of pricing, the new RTX 2070 8GB should be just a bit more expensive than the GTX 1080 8GB, but quite a bit cheaper than the GTX 1080 Ti. Because of that, we feel that the most valid comparison between the RTX 2070 and the previous GTX line is to look at it versus the GTX 1080. If you also want to look at the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, the most straight-forward comparison is against the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp respectively.

While there really isn't much of a difference between any of the cards we tested with our lightest level of grading (since they all achieved near full FPS), the RTX 2070 did extremely well with the two higher grades. Where the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti only saw a 10-25% increase in performance compared to the previous generation cards with the more difficult color grades, the RTX 2070 was about 40% faster than the GTX 1080. This means that it is a much closer match to the GTX 1080 Ti than it is to the GTX 1080.

Fusion Tab FPS – Raw Benchmark Results

Fusion Tab FPS – Benchmark Analysis

Fusion is relatively new to our DaVinci Resolve testing, and so far we haven't been too impressed with how well it takes advantage of the GPU. To be fair, we are not using media footage in these projects that is particularly difficult to process, but given the FPS we saw in each project we doubt that that having multiple GPUs would significantly improve performance even if you are using 8K RED media.

Whether it is due to our test projects or simply how much more CPU dependent Fusion is, we really didn't see much of a difference with any of the cards we tested. However, we will again point out the future potential of the RTX cards for Fusion. The new RT cores in particular could be very interesting and while we have no idea if/when they will be used, it is certainly something to keep in mind.

Is the RTX 2070 good for DaVinci Resolve?

Compared to the previous generation GTX 1080 8GB, the new RTX 2070 8GB is on average about 20% faster although that increases to roughly 40% faster with more difficult levels of color grading. This makes the RTX 2070 a terrific entry option for DaVinci Resolve, even ignoring the new Tensor and RT cores which may be utilized in the future.

There isn't really much mystery here, the RTX cards are simply really good for DaVinci Resolve. Especially if you consider the fact that Blackmagic has already stated that they will be taking advantage of the Tensor cores in Resolve 15, it makes these cards incredibly attractive for use in a color grading workstation. However, not everything is perfect and there is one big issue that you may have to work around: the cooler most RTX cards use.

To put it bluntly, the style of cooler used on the reference cards from NVIDIA and most 3rd party manufacturers is not good for multi-GPU configurations. They can be excellent for a single GPU, but if you want two or more cards the design is sub-optimal. The issue is that the cooler does not exhaust out the back of the system so the hot air generated by the cards is simply recycled inside the system over and over. We didn't see a significant performance drop in our Resolve testing, but we are also testing in an ideal environment with relatively short clips. In GPU-heavy applications like OctaneRender and Redshift, however, we have seen up to a 30% performance drop over time using multiple reference RTX cards. This doesn't mean you cannot use the RTX cards in multi-GPU configurations, but rather that you should try to use cards with a "blower" style cooler that is designed to vent the heat directly outside of the chassis.

If you are interested in how the RTX cards perform in other applications, be sure to check out our recent Video Card articles as we have (or are working on) a number of other articles for the RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti.

DaVinci Resolve Workstations

Puget Systems offers a range of powerful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.

Configure a System!

Labs Consultation Service

Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.