May 30, 2025

Video - DaVinci Resolve - a better video card

Resolve makes heavy demands on your video card.

I have always run low end cards, partly to save money, but also to avoid fan noise and reliability. I currently use an Nvidia 1030 card in my linux system, and it works great to display 4K video on my big monitor. But I don't play games and don't run adobe lightroom (though I wish I could).

Video card 101

There are two big players: AMD and Nvidia. I have been advised to not overlook AMD as they often give you more VRAM for the same money. The general recommendation though for Resolve is to go with Nvidia, it may be the more "mainstream" choice and get attention faster if there are bugs and such.

There are no end of games with marketing, hype, and twists on names. Ignoring that, each Nvidia product has a 4 digit number like 3060. The first 2 digits are the "family". The current "hot" family are the 50xx cards. My 1030 is at the bottom of the list!

Within each family, the last 2 digits tell your the "tier" in that family. A "60" card is at the top of "mid tier". A 70, 80, or 90 are top tier and the gamers will pick one of these depending on how much money they want to spend.

Sometimes the "Ti" suffix is added, which indicates that the card is better in some way. So a 4060 Ti is better than a 4060, and sort of half way between a 4060 and a 4070.

Especially for Resolve, the amount of VRAM is important. You want at least 6G, 86 is better, and 12G is better yet.

The best card for DR

This is clearly the 5090. Ha ha. This is a $3000 card, more or less! As someone says, if you are making money using DR, this investment may pay off if you can get projects done faster.

A recommendation for the "bang for the buck" sweet spot is a 3060 card with a decent amount of memory. These are no longer in production, and "old stock" of brand new cards seem to have oddly high prices. But, there are plenty of used cards on Ebay being sold by people who have upgraded, and they seem to sell for about $250.

Interestingly enough people say a 3060 with 12G is a better choice than a 3060Ti or even a 3070 with only 8G of VRAM.

Just for the record, the 3060 has 3584 CUDA cores. The 3060 has 4864 and the 3070 has 5888. The 4060 has 3072. There is more to this than just counting CUDAs, there are other cores for ray tracing and texture mapping, but they often scale with the CUDA count.

I worry about fan replacement on an older video card with lots of miles on it, but there are plenty of replacement fans being offered. It may even make sense to replace stock fans with fans that are being advertised as quieter. Maybe.

And what about power supply requirements? I read that a 3060 will do just fine with a 550W power supply.

And last, what about brand? It is hard to find any shabby cards with Nvidia chips on them. I like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus -- but all of the big name houses in Taiwan seem to make cards with Nvidia chips that are of high quality.

Roll the dice

I just bid (and lost) on a 3060 with 12G. My top bid was $250 and it sold for $255.

I see these selling on NewEgg for $329, so if you can't get one for $250, you may as well buy new.

Looking at new 3070 cards, they sell for $440 or so, but only with 8G. It seems hard to find 3070 cards with more than 8G.

Looking at new 4060 cards, they sell for $440 with 8G of ram, but you have to pay $750 to get a card with 16G of ram.

So I look on Ebay at 3070 cards. I find one for $299, a 3070Ti "buy it now". I do read that the 3070Ti is power hungry, using 290W. Compare this to 170W for the 3060. The official recommendation is a 750W power supply, minimum.

Here are some TDP (Total design power) numbers:

3060 -- 170W
3070Ti -- 290W
4060 -- 115W
4070 -- 200W
Also worth considering is a 2080ti
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

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