Question
I heard that the free version of DaVinci Resolve can't handle GPU processing or 4K. Is it true?
Answer
That's not true.
Even the free version uses the GPU properly. 4K editing is also possible. However, in the paid version, H.264 hardware encoding/decoding and H.265 hardware decoding of NVIDIA/AMD/Intel QuickSync work on Windows.
That's why the paid version can speed things up. For example, when using an NVIDIA GPU and editing H.264 material and exporting to H.264, the NVIDIA GPU is used for encoding and decoding, so the paid version has significantly better editing performance than the free version. Writing speed will also be smoother. On the other hand, even if you're using an NVIDIA GPU, you won't see a speedup when exporting ProRes material to XAVC, for example, and if you're reading and writing H.264, NVIDIA/AMD/Intel QuickSync will not speed things up. If your machine doesn't have a hardware encoder/decoder, you won't get much speed. In the paid version, you can select "Use hardware acceleration for H.264/H.265 decoding" in "Decoding Options" in "Preferences".
The relationship between the free version of DaVinci Resolve and the GPU is described in more detail in the next article.
A comparison of the free version and the paid version is summarized in the following article.
Not a paid version, can't edit! A common question in this question is a camera video taken with a video bit depth of 10bit. Editing video shot with most consumer cameras is basically almost nonexistent.