Our hardware set up consists of two parts; rendering workstation (stay-at-home) and player units (travelling or working units). See our Gear pages for current hardware breakdown.
Up until middle of 2021 we heavily relied on Intel NUC8i7HNK i7-8705G w/ Radeon RX Vega M GL as our go-to player units. These lightweight, powerful and reliable workhorses were used as playback units. But they started to age a bit and it made sense to explore some alternatives. Portability has always been important to us but at the same time we did not want to rely on laptop hardware for visual playback. In general it is our opinion that laptops are not the best option for running visuals on big screens for extended length of time. For the reason we’ve always opted for mini-PCs such as the Intel NUC with built-in Radeon graphics.
Because of the GPU shortage and also due to size constraints we opted to go with an ASROCK Deskmini X300W barebones systems. We purchased two of these and expanded them with AMD Ryzen 7 5700G APUs, 32gb of RAM, 2.5 tb NVME SSD and Noctua coolers. The 5700G APU is an outstanding Radeon graphics “card” built into the CPU. It comes stock with a 2000mhz clock frequency which we overclocked easily to 2300 mhz. The entire system runs super cool and barely goes over 60 degrees even when playing multiple 1080p streams.
It is always interesting to see folks building out bulky-super-powerful units that simply play back video…. Is it always necessary to have a nVidia 3090 or an AMD XT 3900 top of the line GPU to show 1080p or even 4k visuals? The answer is a no if you take the time to optimize your content. We’ve never had any trouble playing multiple 1080p videos in Resolute out of our old Intel NUCs. These NUCs did not even have a dedicated video card, yet none ever had playback issues. Why you ask? Because we convert all of our content to DXV codec. It is highly efficient and plays back flawlessly even on low end APUs negating the need for high end expensive GPUs for playback.
At the moment all of our content is rendered in 4k on our high-end workstations, then converted to 1080p DXV format for Resolume playback.
It is important to note that every situation is different and if there is a need to support multiple 1080p or 4k projectors then high end GPUs will most likely be required. Right now for us two 5700G APU powered players are sufficient.