Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles.
One app.

Start reading

Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles. One news app.

Start reading

Windows Central

Technology

Richard Devine

Snapdragon X Elite laptops have a professional-grade video editor at long last, and it's completely free

Snapdragon Best Buy DaVinci Resolve Lenovo Windows Dell Blackmagic Amazon CDKeys HP

What you need to know

Having been initially announced at the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve video editor is now finally available for Windows on ARM.
DaVinci Resolve 19 has been in beta for a while but has now exited and is generally available, becoming the first version with native support for the new Snapdragon X series chips.
Available in free and paid versions, DaVinci Resolve has handily beaten Adobe Premiere Pro to the punch in gaining native support for Copilot+ PCs.

It's been a long time coming, but Blackmagic has finally released its first version of DaVinci Resolve with native support for Windows on ARM. Having been announced way back at the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Resolve has been in beta for a while now, but that period has ended, and it is now generally available.

DaVinci Resolve 19 is the first version of the powerful video editing software that has been made available with ARM64 support, making it fully compatible with the new Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips.

Crucially, it gains an early edge over its main competition on Windows, Adobe Premiere Pro, where the latter is still yet to be updated with ARM64 support. Indeed, it only recently became useable through emulation on ARM laptops, so on this front, Adobe is lagging far behind.

DaVinci Resolve for ARM was first announced at last year's Snapdragon Summit. (Image credit: DaVinci Resolve)

DaVinci Resolve 19 is, of course, also available for Intel and AMD machines, but the big news is the long-awaited arrival for ARM. Best of all, it's still available completely free, and not in a shady upselling way, either.

DaVinci Resolve Studio, the premium version, does boast a number of additional features, but as Blackmagic says itself, the free version contains more than you find in some paid software. It's also available for a one off $295 upgrade fee, no terrible subscription model, here.

It's also important to note that if you're using an older Windows on ARM machine, it doesn't look like you can join in. We tried installing it on a Surface Pro X, and it threw up a GPU error.

This is big, though, for creators using Windows. While Copilot+ PCs using the new Snapdragon chips are still small in number, going forward it will surely grow by some size. The fact that DaVinci Resolve is here now is another tick in the box. This is a serious quality piece of software, and it's not overselling it to call it a professional-grade application.

Anyone can download and use it for free, but it really is used by Hollywood. Notable movies, including Deadpool 2, Avengers: Infinity War, John Wick 3, and Avatar, were all edited using DaVinci Resolve. And now you can use that same software on your new Snapdragon-powered laptop. Download it for yourself now and see what all the fuss is about.