DaVinci Resolve ships with a control whose entire purpose is to make your renders slower — and it lives in the Deliver page, right next to the render button. Most advice about slow rendering jumps straight to GPUs, RAM and drive speed. Before any of that, check the handful of controls Blackmagic's own reference manual describes in terms of speed.
The throttle almost nobody looks for
In the Render Settings, the manual documents this:
"Render speed: A dropdown menu lets you throttle the speed at which media is rendered. Ordinarily you'll leave this set to the default of Maximum. However, some storage systems that are shared by multiple rooms in a facility use storage area networks (SANs) with insufficient bandwidth for multiple real-time image streams. DaVinci Resolve's incredibly fast rendering speeds can cause playback problems with other users accessing the SAN if available bandwidth is insufficient. In this case, you can throttle the render speed to limit SAN bandwidth usage to between 1 to 50 percent of full rendering speed."
Three things there are worth pulling out.
The default is Maximum. If yours is not on Maximum, something or someone changed it.
The stated reason has nothing to do with your machine. The manual's justification is shared storage: a facility where several rooms pull from the same SAN, and one workstation rendering flat out starves everybody else's real-time playback. If you are a solo editor on local storage, the problem this setting exists to solve does not apply to you.
The range is the one official number here: "between 1 to 50 percent of full rendering speed."
What the manual does not give is any figure for how much longer a render actually takes at a given throttle setting. If you want that number, measure it on your own footage; there is nothing official to cite.
One more detail about where the setting lives: the manual notes that "All Render settings are saved on a per‑project basis."
The fastest fix — and the render you can skip entirely
If Render speed is set to anything other than Maximum, set it back. That is the whole fix, and unlike everything else on this page it costs nothing in image quality.
Then ask whether the render needs to happen at all. If the timeline is unchanged and you are only re-exporting to get a smaller file for email or an upload limit, you do not have to go through the Deliver page for that.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
It runs inside this browser tab: the file is read from disk, re-encoded locally and handed back, never uploaded. For the tradeoffs behind the preset, see how to compress a video without losing quality, or go straight to the video compressor.
Three checkboxes that buy time by spending quality
The manual names three render settings whose stated purpose is saving time. Each one carries a condition, and the condition is the important half.
"Use optimized media: When this checkbox is turned on, DaVinci Resolve will use optimized media, when available, to do the final render, to save time. If your media has been optimized to the same format as the one you're outputting to (or better), this is convenient. However, if you've optimized to a lower quality format than what you're outputting to, you should turn this checkbox off to force DaVinci Resolve to process all clips using the original media, guaranteeing the best quality available."
"Use proxy media: When this checkbox is turned on, DaVinci Resolve will use the generated proxy media, when available, to do the final render, to save time. However, if your proxies are a lower-quality format than what you're outputting to, you should turn this checkbox off to force DaVinci Resolve to process all clips using the original media, guaranteeing the best quality available."
"Use render cached images: When this checkbox is turned on, DaVinci Resolve will write media from the cache to the files being output to save time. If you're caching using the same media format you're outputting to (or better), this can be convenient. However, if you're caching in a lower-quality format than the one you're outputting to, you'll want to turn this checkbox off to force DaVinci Resolve to process all media as it's being rendered, writing at the maximum quality you're outputting to."
Read the conditions literally. The manual does not say these switches degrade your output — it says they degrade it when the optimized, proxy or cached format is lower quality than the format you are rendering to. Cache at the same format or better and the manual calls the result "convenient."
The social media presets carry the same idea with blunter wording: "Use Proxy Media: Lets your final render use the proxy media instead of the original source camera files. Useful if speed is more important than quality."
For a review copy, leaving these on is exactly what they are for. For a final master, the manual's own advice is to turn off any of the three whose source format sits below your delivery format.
Encoder settings the manual connects to speed
Three more controls are described in speed terms:
- Hardware acceleration. "Use hardware acceleration if available: DaVinci Resolve supports QuickSync hardware encoding of H.264 and HEVC, if available on your workstation." The manual also notes that "Workstations using NVIDIA GPUs that offer NVENC will present alternative accelerated options, while other workstations offering QuickSync hardware encoding instead will be able to use that option."
- Multi-pass encode, listed as "(Available for QuickTime H.264 and H.265)": "Single pass is faster, but multi-pass yields superior results when quality is important."
- Frame Reordering, same QuickTime H.264/H.265 scope: "On by default... Turning off Frame Reordering will speed encoding performance at the expense of visual quality."
The Supported Formats and Codecs list (July 2025) adds two caveats: "GPU accelerated encoding and decoding of formats is subject to hardware support. Please refer to the hardware manufacturer's documentation." And on Windows the H.264 and H.265 encode entry reads "8-bit OS-supported profiles. More profiles and GPU acceleration in Studio" — GPU acceleration there is listed as a Studio capability. Platform differences are large; see H.264 export on Windows vs Linux.
When "I didn't change anything" still means a full re-encode
Resolve can copy video through without re-encoding, but the conditions are narrow:
"Bypass re-encode eliminates the need to re-encode video media, preserves quality, and speeds up the output process dramatically, but it only works for clips in the Timeline to which no additional effects have been added. Doing any grading, adding a Resolve FX plugin, adding any overlapping effects or compositing to clips in the Timeline, resizing or stabilizing clips or altering the output sizing of the Timeline, and adding Fusion effects will all necessitate re-encoding the entire clip in order to process these effects. Transitions will require processing but only for the duration of each transition."
And in the same codec list, the "Codec Passthrough" column is – for H.264, H.265, MV-HEVC, AV1 and VP9 across every platform and container. If your source is H.264, that table says a passthrough render is not on the menu regardless of how untouched the timeline is. How bypass re-encode actually works covers which formats do carry a passthrough value.
How to tell it worked
Render a short in/out range rather than the whole program, and compare wall-clock time before and after changing Render speed. If the throttle was the cause, the difference shows up immediately. If nothing changes, the encoder settings above are the next place to look.
FAQ
Where is the Render speed setting in DaVinci Resolve? It is a dropdown in the Render Settings on the Deliver page. The manual describes it as letting you "throttle the speed at which media is rendered," with a default of Maximum.
How much does throttling actually slow a render down? The manual gives the range as "between 1 to 50 percent of full rendering speed" but never states how much longer a given render takes. Time a short range yourself.
Does turning on proxy or optimized media hurt my final export? Only under the stated condition. The manual says to turn the checkbox off if you optimized or proxied to a lower quality format than the one you are outputting to. Same format or better, and it describes using them as convenient.
Why does Resolve re-encode everything when I only made one cut? Any grading, Resolve FX, compositing, resizing, stabilization, output-size change or Fusion effect "will all necessitate re-encoding the entire clip," per the manual. Separately, H.264, H.265, AV1 and VP9 have no Codec Passthrough value in the official codec list.
My render is stuck at a percentage — is that documented? No. Blackmagic's documentation does not explain renders stalling at a percentage, and documents no relationship between render failures and VRAM. If yours halts rather than crawls, see DaVinci Resolve render failed.
The rest of the export troubleshooting lives in the fix archive; every browser-based converter and compressor is in all Clapr tools.
Quotes from the DaVinci Resolve 21 Reference Manual and the official Supported Formats and Codecs list (July 2025), checked 16 September 2026. That codec list states its contents are "subject to change without notice" — verify against the current PDFs.
