Potential bottlenecks with RED 8K playback

[Dennis S.]

Hello guys,

we are thinking of purchasing a new workstation that should be able to playback 8K footage from our RED Helium S35 in realtime.
I remember that NVIDIA and RED announced a cooperation to accelerate 8K Playback back in 2018, by offloading debayering and decoding on a Tegra based GPU. I assume this is also valid for Ampere based cards?
Has this feature been implemented by various NLEs already? We mostly use DaVinci Resolve for editing.

Given your experience with 8K footage, where do you see the most potential bottlenecks occuring, in terms of playback performance?
To give some examples:

CPU: Cores/Threads favorable over pure clockrate?
GPUs: Ampere based cards a viable choice for 8K playback. (eg. RTX 3090) Multiple GPUs a good choice to further increase playback performance?
Disk I/O: Any general information available of how much disk I/O throughput (or IOPS) is needed to playback 8K footage, without your storage becoming a bottleneck?
RAM: How much RAM would you go for?

I guess what i am looking for is some general feedback and experiences of people who already have to handle 8K footage in their post production and what kind of hardware they use to deal with it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Aaron Green]

Hey Dennis. I can add a little bit of feedback from my setup. Granted, I only edit 6k r3d raw and 8k canon raw. I’m getting smooth real-time playback with Resolve using Ryzen 9 3950 16 core, RTX 3080, 128gb RAM, m.1 SSD.

 

[Roberto Leone]

Hey Dennis. I can add a little bit of feedback from my setup. Granted, I only edit 6k r3d raw and 8k canon raw. I’m getting smooth real-time playback with Resolve using Ryzen 9 3950 16 core, RTX 3080, 128gb RAM, m.1 SSD.

the 6k raw footage that you edit is stored inside the SSD or standard HDD?