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4K is a resource hog, period. It's not so much the software as how you use it and where you configure it. I spent months fighting incredibly slow renders before I figured out I was saving proxies on an old external drive connected via USB 2.0 - total dumb move. Once I moved my working files to a fast SSD and set up proxies at reduced resolution, everything changed.
DaVinci Resolve is solid if you know how to set up your project: optimize the timeline to 1/4 resolution while you're editing, enable GPU accelerators (CUDA or Metal), and save the full render only for final export. Adobe Premiere works just as well but obviously costs money. The real bottleneck is almost never the software itself - it's insufficient RAM (16 GB is fine only if you're not doing anything else), too-slow storage, or the codec you're using for 4K (H.265 is compressed but murders your CPU, ProRes Raw is heavy but smooth).
If your machine already has a decent GPU and at least 32 GB of RAM, the software barely matters. But if you're pushing the limits, Shotcut or even ffmpeg from the command line will save you resources. Honestly though, the real savings come when you copy your footage to a dedicated drive and configure the software to work smart, not with brute force.
it depends on your pc, but if you have a decent machine davinci resolve is free and does its job well, without weird lag. if you want something more lightweight maybe try shotcut, even though for 4K smoothness davinci is superior. Adobe Premiere is powerful but costs quite a bit and anyway it's not a miracle if your hardware can't handle it. the most important thing is having enough RAM (16GB minimum, 32 if you can) and maybe a fast SSD for cache files.
Lag with 4K isn't just about software, it's mostly about what you've got attached to your PC. Even DaVinci Resolve (which is actually pretty good) will make you suffer if you don't have enough RAM or your work drive is slow - 4K eats up a ton of space, and if your system has to keep swapping it's game over. What nobody ever mentions is that you need to set up proxies properly: meaning work with downscaled versions while you're editing, not the native 4K. Once you do that, pretty much any decent editor becomes smooth.
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