New card for 4K video editing

[sundeep]

Hello everyone,

I recently started working on 4K content (home/travel videos). And I have run into a bottleneck. I use Davinci resolve for editing/colour grading works.

I have two PC's :
PC1 which I use for photo/video editing is a HP Elite 8200 SFF running i7 2600 with a Nvidia GeForce GT 710 card. (this is where I do my video editing for GoPro content)
PC2 is running on a i5 4670 with HD4600 video card. This is primarily used for media storage and runs 24/7.

Rendering is really choppy to the point that I can't edit the video.Even on the 1080 timeline I have this issue. Rather than down-scaling, I want a solution where my system is able to render a 4K timeline.

Here are my problems, with PC1 AFAIK has only 240W PSU, so pretty much can Only use a low profile video card. So, that's out of the way.
PC2 is my only option and it runs with 16 GB RAM and on a 650W PSU.

My budget is $500. I am looking at the 8GB RX 480 card. Would this have enough grunt for video editing ?
There are so many brands for this mode, but reading through other forums many users suggested the MSI model.

Please give me your suggestions. Thanks in advance !

 

[nickmania]

well first you need to check the davinci software, which is top software but no common, to know where is the bottleneck. it can be the RAM, the HDD or the CPU, not only the GPU. In fact is rare that the GPU is causing you problems. So you need to use the program and find what is demanding prior to change the system.

normally this video softwares precharge the timeline in the RAM and calculate using the CPU, so If you are short on RAM you probably need a SSD that can run the timeline in real time, or if your CPU is at 99% when you are playing the video in the timeline (this is different to render, but I think is your main problem) you need to upgrade the CPU.

a trick is open the windows task viewer and check what is causing the problem.

 

[sundeep]

Thanks for your reply. I have been keeping a check on the overall system performance while editing and came to a conclusion that its a the video card causing the bottleneck.

But since you have suggested, I just did another run and attached the pics while playing back video in Davinci Resolve. Please have a look. CPU and RAM look quite reasonable.

 

[nickmania]

do you have render cache enabled? red color on one of your nodes means that the software need to re-render the clip so is normal you cannot play in real time when one node is in red color.

take a look at this tips also:

http://timeinpixels.com/2015/08/how-to-improve-davinci-resolve-12-performance/

 

[sundeep]

do you have render cache enabled? red color on one of your nodes means that the software need to re-render the clip so is normal you cannot play in real time when one node is in red color.

The red outline is because I selected the particular video in the editing window. I understand what your talking about. The red line comes in the edit window.

In this particular example, I haven't used cache but I have tried all those options to optimise the video for playback. Even when I set the proxy mode to quarter it still comes with choppy playback.