When I render my 4K video the CPU averages around 29% usage, storage 13% and GPU 78%.... Nothing is pegged at 100%. What's my bottleneck or how do I find it? Or is there a setting in davinci resolve that I should configure?

CPU: AMD 3970x
Memory: 41.8/63.9 (25gb is being used by PrimoCache)
Disk 0 is an HDD with SSD PrimoCache
GPU: GTX 1080
Watercooled CPU (69C) and GPU (43C) - while rendering
Export/renders have little to no fusion usage, 4K h.264 MP4, 23.976fps, Quality restricted to 90000 kb/s, encoding profile auto

On my old system rendering these type of 4k videos, I could see that my i7-6700k was pegged at 100% usage throughout the rendering while the GPU around 12%. So I thought upgrading to the AMD 3970x would chop my renders time by 600+% but it's only about 200-300%. I know that's great but still hoping to optimize my setup if I can.

https://imgur.com/a/3dw7UUQ

With that codec you will have better decompression and compression with the Resolve Studio version.

Peter Chamberlain wrote:With that codec you will have better decompression and compression with the Resolve Studio version.

[not sure if my reply went throgh] I'm already using the Resolve Studio version, purchased through ToolFarm.

GPU driver?

Peter Chamberlain wrote:GPU driver?

In device manager it's showing NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, Driver Date: 3/25/2021, Driver Version: 27.21.14.6589

I do 3 hour 4k video podcasts and on the i7-6700k (overclocked and watercooled) it was rendering these videos in 6-7 hours.

With this AMD Threadripper 3970x it's rendering the same 3 hour 4k videos in about 2 hours. This 3970x is water cooled and stays around 68-70c underload, and 39c at idle. (both Amd Ryzen Master and HWInfo show the same temperatures)

As suggested the GPU driver is up to date. No devices in the device manager show an error/alert notice. I've even updated the AMD chipset drivers to the latest.

I've tried setting PrimoCache to different settings just to see if it helps anything, but it doesn't as expected since the original screenshot shows the storage drive only at 17% usage.

I'm not quite sure what else to try playing with to see what can help.

Is it possible that Davinci Resolve Studio is only able to use around 8 CPU cores?

I have a render running right now and decided to take some screenshots of task manager with the CPU cores showing. See image below

It appears that only 9 out 64 logical processors ever show 100%, with an addition of 2 over 90%, 1 over 80%, 2 over 60%, 2 over 50% and 1 over 30%. Leaving 47 hanging out not helping.

Overall utilization sits around 28% the whole time and 72C for temperature. Online sources say this AMD 3970x can hit over 85C and still not thermal throttle, so I'm 13C well below that.

Hi

Can you provide a screenshot of the video render settings you use for H.264?
And can I check if the render settings for H.264 show an Nvidia option?

I know you last updated your driver to the one from Mar 25... But if this option is not present, can you re-install the latest Studio driver from Nvidia, and in the installer, can you choose Custom > Clean Install (may require a couple of restarts)? If that resolves your issue, please do consider turning off Windows DCH driver auto-updates so you may run your own preferred driver versions.

And lastly, a couple of easy questions-
a. I couldn't see any mention of version - can I check if you are you running DaVinci Resolve 17.1.1 Studio?
b. Can I check if, this was a system you built, if the GPU is connected to the fastest PCIE slot, and the displays are all connected to the GPU?

Regards
Shrinivas

newb0001 wrote:I have a render running right now and decided to take some screenshots of task manager with the CPU cores showing. See image below

It appears that only 9 out 64 logical processors ever show 100%, with an addition of 2 over 90%, 1 over 80%, 2 over 60%, 2 over 50% and 1 over 30%. Leaving 47 hanging out not helping.

Overall utilization sits around 28% the whole time and 72C for temperature. Online sources say this AMD 3970x can hit over 85C and still not thermal throttle, so I'm 13C well below that.

It's doubtful you will ever get all those core busy with single h264 encode.
Most encoders saturate around 16 cores. It's normal as high parallelism for complex codecs is not really possible. Also if you encode HD, not UHD then it's even more likely that you see relatively small CPU usage on machine with that many cores.
Less complex codecs (ProRes, DNxHR etc. ) can easier use that many cores.

It's also possible your GPU is slowing you down if you have some complex node structure and use noise reduction, blur etc. 80% of GPU load is high.
Try same with very simple export without any adjustments.

Shrinivas Ramani wrote:Hi

Can you provide a screenshot of the video render settings you use for H.264?
And can I check if the render settings for H.264 show an Nvidia option?

I know you last updated your driver to the one from Mar 25... But if this option is not present, can you re-install the latest Studio driver from Nvidia, and in the installer, can you choose Custom > Clean Install (may require a couple of restarts)? If that resolves your issue, please do consider turning off Windows DCH driver auto-updates so you may run your own preferred driver versions.

And lastly, a couple of easy questions-
a. I couldn't see any mention of version - can I check if you are you running DaVinci Resolve 17.1.1 Studio?
b. Can I check if, this was a system you built, if the GPU is connected to the fastest PCIE slot, and the displays are all connected to the GPU?

Regards
Shrinivas

Your second question is what I needed. It was on Native and not NVIDIA.

TLDR; using NVIDIA encoder made my renders soooooOOOO much faster!

I'm such a NEWB! (my username is perfect) Gosh, I wasted so much time and money...

I'm going to try to phrase this so that new people that might follow my footsteps could find the answer easier. Everything I'm about to say is all beginner knowledge stuff, so if you're an advanced user no need to read and laugh at me, carry on

I think the problem I had was so many people already did write about rendering with GPU and even the speed increase over CPU. But I didn't know that was the correct question to ask. Instead I was asking things like:
- should a 3 hour 4k video render take 6 hours to complete?
- during video export, why is my i7 6700k pegged at 100% but my GPU isn't being used?
- what are the key benefits of purchasing the davinci resolve studio version?
- will davinci resolve studio speed up my rendering times? (over the free version)
- why is my GPU not being used during rendering?
- if upgrade my CPU from intel i7 6700k to amd 3970x, will it improve my video rendering times? if so by how much?
- how do I improve my rendering times?
- best CPU video encoding scores
- what hardware do I need to render/encode 4k video the fastest?

When I started on this troubleshooting and/or improvement journey I was using Davinci Resolve (free version). Which I don't think I ever saw the encoder dropdown option when going to deliver.

Sadly I purchased the AMD 3970x first. Later I purchased the Davinci Studio version. While having the 3970x CPU and Davinci Studio version I still didn't notice the "Encoder" dropdown because I carried over my saved presets. I continued rendering/delivering videos using my preset which at this point had the encoder set to "Native" (software/cpu rendering).

It was last night I was playing around with my presets and exploring what other options were available when exporting video. I notice a new option (to me) "Encoder" below the format and codec but above the network optimization checkbox. I decided to switch that encoder option from "Native" to "NVIDIA". I did a test render on my typical 3 hour 4k podcast and saw what is normally 6 hours on the i7 6700k, or 2 hours on the Threadripper 3970x, show 50 minutes. This was the moment of realizing why people were saying davinci resolve utilizes your GPU. Up until that point, I only saw davinci resolve utilizing my CPU.

Was it that I purchased Davinci Resolve Studio that the encoder option has opened up? But for new people how would they know that they could have faster renders if they bought the Studio version so that they could get the encoder option? I hope next time around, someone googles one of my questions about and finds this post.

Knowing what I know now, of course the obvious questions I "should" have asked were:
- is NVIDIA/AMD encoder faster than Native?
- how do I get the encoder NVIDIA or encoder AMD option?

Unfortunately the question "How to speed up my render", there are a lot of great articles online for that question. But it's tough knowing when being a newb, why people are talking about GPU encoding but my free Davinci Resolve is only using the CPU. Of course now I know it's the paid Studio version that unlocks that option.

But as a newb, you often don't know the correct questions to ask.

It sucks that I wasted so much money on a new system. I even had to keep my existing GTX1080 since the gpu shortage caused prices to be so extreme. But I'm happy I ended up at my original goal, to speed up rendering times. I am in the ballpark I wanted, which was under an hour render for a 3 hour 4k video.

Disclaimer: My journey might not be for every future newb. My videos have little to no fusion usage. I use a mild amount of fairlight FX stuff for audio. I do minor color shading. So for my use case GPU rendering was night and day faster when using "Encoder: NVIDIA" over the "Encoder: Native"

A suggested feature would be to have a disabled "encoder" drop down on the Davinci Resolve free version. And whenever the user mouseovers it it could display a message that "GPU hardware rendering is available on the Studio version, which could improve render times up to 600% faster than CPU/software rendering"