It's not just in the data centers that the battle for supremacy among AI hardware manufacturers is raging right now. In the area of workstation applications, too, AMD and Nvidia in particular are going all out to provide the best possible performance experience for users in new types of AI applications.
With the release of DaVinci Resolve 18.5 in early 2023, numerous additional AI tools and features came to the application-among them AI-accelerated object recognition, scaling, or intelligent masking for color correction. And after the launch, it looked like these features would only enjoy hardware acceleration with Nvidia's cards until further notice.
But for the latest update to DaVinci Resolve 18.6, the AMD and Blackmagic Design development teams are said to have worked closely together to also enable an optimized machine learning pipeline for running AI workloads on AMD hardware. And these optimizations are now starting to bear fruit - which should result in a significant performance boost for several popular AI functions.
AI acceleration is now available under Resolve even with AMD GPUs
Instead of Nvidia's CUDA, Blackmagic uses Microsoft's DirectML platform API for AMD hardware, which is then accelerated via the AMD User Mode Driver. An AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card should be able to calculate AI functions up to six times faster than under Resolve 18.5.
However, upscaling from HD to 8K using AI SuperScale is said to be "only" 1.5 times faster, while Magic Mask is said to be a remarkable 4 times faster. However, since AMD does not mention any comparison rates to Nvidia, we would hardly assume that Nvidia still holds the performance crown in these features.
The following functions are supposed to be significantly accelerated by AMD's drivers in the new version:
Auto Balance (Auto Color)
Shot Match
Smart Reframe
DNN-based Deinterlace
SuperScale
Magic Mask - Person Mask and Object Mask
Analyze Clip for People (FaceTagging)
Detect Scene Cuts
Gyroscopic Stabilization
Speed Warp
Voice Isolation
Dialog Leveler
Audio Classification
Audio Transcription
Create Subtitles from Audio
ResolveFX DepthMap
ResolveFX FaceRefinement
ResolveFX Relight
ResolveFX Stylize
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