Laptops and 3D rendering?
novelist999
Posts: 90
in The Commons
Can laptops handle 3D rendering? Many years ago, I read that 3D rendering would burn a laptop out. I ask, because I'm purchasing a small house, and it would be great if I could conserve space by using a laptop instead of a desktop.
Thanks!
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I render on one. Works just fine.
Laurie
I also render on a laptop, and I've had this 'ol girl for about four years, and she's still getting along just fine.
That was somewhat true...and kind of still is.
The $300 Walmart 'Back to School' special...probably true. Decent, mid to high end 'gaming' rig, not true...but even those can struggle with it. A 'portable workstation'...pretty much what it's designed for. but are 'super high end' prices.
What it boils down to is how much you will be willing to spend on a laptop and how much of a performance hit you can handle. Dollar for dollar, a desktop, for graphics work, will be cheaper...for the same/similar performace/resources (and things like memory do have some very hard limits in laptops...like it's nearly impossible to get above 32 GB of RAM in a laptop and there aren't that many that will accept 16 GB sticks, for most 16 GB is the absolute max).
All of the above is very true. I have a gaming laptop. It cost more than my desktop and the desktop is MUCH more powerful. The only reason I use the laptop is because I am disabled (have trouble walking) and it's easier for me to just sit in the living room and work with a laptop and a portable laptop desk in front of the TV than it is to sit in my bedroom and use the computer in a much more uncomfortable chair ;). Otherwise I'd be always using the desktop.
Laurie
Yeah :( a chunk of the price for a laptop is the portability factor. For me, while portablility is nice, the novelty wears off pretty quickly and I'd much rather put the money into the machines power and customization.
I understand you are trying to save space, but I'm guessing you are going to have to put your laptop on something... I'm using a simple, small 4 legged table for my desktop with my tower tucked nicely underneath.
I have a laptop that I payed over $1200 for about 5-6 years ago. Can handle any and all of the games I play on it including dragons age, the newest Diablo, the Witcher Series etc. It will render but it tends to get a bit bogged down the more you add to it. And if its an iray render once I hit that button I might as well not bother trying to do anything else. My desktop on the other hand has no problems at all handling most of what I throw at. If I had to pick only one or the other to render on I would go for the PC and sink as much money into the graphics card and memory as you can.
I travel a lot for work and I can't carry a desktop around so laptop it is. Last one I bought was a lenovo mid-range laptop (for their range) that cost about $900 with an i7, 8 GB memory, and a nvidia 2 GB 790M GPU. I got this before iRay and regretted the extra cost for the GPU because I didnt realize DAZ studio wouldn't use it. Then a while later iray came along and I was grateful for it.
I have limits on my machine as you can see, and I'm impatient. I want my renders done in under 20 minutes, or even 10 minutes. In response I've tended to favor renders that are sort of in the style of the golden age of comics. That is, if you look at those old comics you will see that the artists didn't bother drawing all the furniture in the room. Often it was a colored panel with the characters and maybe one or two key props (a desk and window, for example) that the characters were interacting with. I don't try to make things look "old school comics" but I do tend to produce that sort of minimalistic render due to the limitations of my laptop. To see what I mean, see a couple of samples below. The last one was actually an effort to recreate a fake pulp cover from the game Fallout 4, by the way. Pulps also followed that "just draw the characters and one or two peices to give it some context" rule like the old comics did.
They are likely to 'burn out' a laptop faster, although the new 10series cards in laptops might change that slightly. Of course, likely doesn't mean will.
The main issue, is not upgradable and cost more for the same - considerably more in some cases. And further, few choices of components.
Yes. I render everything I do on an Asus. I don't like to sit at a desk when I work on a computer. Using a gaming laptop works great for what I do.
Well Laurie, there's your answer. Be comfortable. What that means- spend the money and get a comfortable chair (like a Serta chair at Office Depot when they're on sale) and use a desktop, or use a laptop on the couch. Your health and comfort is the top priority, not increased speed. I used my Samsung laptop 100% for three years for heavy duty rendering on my Art Studio product showcase thread- it held up just fine. Now I'm on an Alienware51 which quadrupled the speed, and I wouldn't go back to a laptop- but I would if I weren't physically comfortable. You need to enjoy doing the art, and if you're achy or uncomfortable, that's not optimal.
So perhaps think about getting a decent chair, go sit in them and see how amazing those Serta chairs are! (Worth every penny) then get a desktop- or stick with a laptop on the couch and be comfy.
I was looking at one of those chairs...don't get out much to "test sit" any of them tho LOL. Soon tho, hubby is going to redo the living room so I won't have a choice but to hang out in the bedroom. Maybe then I'll spring for a really good chair ;). Something tells me it'll never be as comfy as my loveseat, but hopefully comfy enough to spend a couple hours in ;).
I DO like the convenience and portability of the laptop. But it's just not as practical or cost effective as a desktop at this point in time :).
Laurie
I use a laptop as well so I can take my 3D fun when I travel. I make sure it can breath well. Check the vents often for blockages as the fan(s) will certainly fun full throttle most of the time while rendering. Good to check dust collectors on desktops, too!!!
I built a wood stand with a large slow DC variable speed fan (I'm into electronics as a hobby and formerly a career) that blows air into the largest openings on the bottom of the laptop and used a wood router to add air channels to a couple other ventilation inlets on the bottom. It is sloped and has a short wrist rest in front to hold the laptop in place. The exhaust air temperature dropped several degrees just doing this. The extra room for airflow did the trick. You could simply raise up the laptop keeping the air passages clear when rendering.
Another benefit of raising the laptop is getting it away from the surface where it can suck in dust, etc more easily being so close to the surface.
...used to work on an old 32 bit 4 GB notebook when I started in this. Heat was the major issue as it was one with just the single side fan (many of the new gaming and workstation notebooks these days have "flow through" cooling with dual intakes in front and vents in the rear). I am now using a wireless keyboard as the heat from rendering pretty much burned out the original keyboard on the machine. I now only use it for writing, creating photomanips, and doing stuff on the Net.
Wen I was still using it for production I had to keep things fairly limited as only 2 GB was allocated for running a programme, not a big deal in teh early days, but when Daz 3.1 and UE came out it usually was "crash city" when rendering. Even just using the normal lights I had to limit how much was in the scene to avoid a crash.. When Daz 4.0 came out I could barely run it as I'd even get crashes while working in the viewport before rendering. That prompted me to move to 64 bit and a tower rather than another notebook due to greater expandability, and the fact I could save money building it myself. (the base cost sans display was between 1,200$ and 1,300$ which was nearly half of what a notebook would have cost with the same resources (i7 notebooks were expensive then and the only other CPUs available were AMD or Intel Core 2 Quad mobiles). Also that was for a system which did not have a dedicated GPU.
The nice part is even though it is 4 years old now, I can still expand and upgrade many components which cannot be done in a notebook (other than memory and the HDD/SSD).
I also use a laptop for DAZ work, because I take it with me many places. I'll be replacing come Black Friday, because the USB ports are failing. Might as well get a bigger card while I'm at it.
I fried my laptop when I first started out rendering, as I had no idea about heat and stuff - regular consumer laptop, the poor thing.
I have a new laptop now, but as was mentioned above, heat is an issue, and I get itchy when it renders for more than two or so minutes. I do all of my rendering on my PC, which is also what I have "invested" the money into. The current rig runs a I7-4770 CPU and is 3 years old now. Buying the PC was insane money back then (€1600, which is about $2000 or so?), but rendering is something that really makes me happy, so I figured that other people spend this much on cigarettes and booze, I can spend it on a new PC. I recently upgraded the memory (from 16Gb to 32), as well as the VidCard (got my greedy fingers on a 980Ti that was on sale). The PC also works nicely as an additional heater now.
Anyway, to get back to the initial question... You can, but if you have just your regular laptop, I wouldn't recommend it.
Thanks for all of the comments. I decided to buy a bigger house and stick with a desktop--though I use a laptop for writing. It's a cheap laptop though. I don't think it could handle even the newest games.
That sound reasonable, laptop for writing, desktop for rendering. Laptops do tend to heat up while rendering.
Yeah, id pick a house over a laptop too :P
I bet a laptop that costs as much as a house could render anything!
What if I told you that you can do BOTH?
Why does everybody forget that they can stream a desktop to a laptop no problem? Its not hard, either. The answer is right there, and since you are going to have both pieces of hardware, well boom, you can absolutely do that. The real beauty of streaming is that you can use any piece of junk on the streaming end. The Big Desktop does all of the heavy lifting, and all the streaming device has to do is be able to handle the stream...and nearly everything these days can do that. Even phones and tablets and an option. And yes, I have done all of these myself. I have streamed to tablet, laptop and phone. Of these, my freakin phone was more powerful than my piece of junk laptop, as it is almost 10 years old now. I have also used Amazon tablets, and if any of you know about them, they are pretty weak devices, but capable enough to stream. You can buy a OTG cable which allows you to plug a USB device to the phones and tablets.
Since you are talking about being in home, this makes it even easier. All you need is good Wifi. I am not talking about high speed, though obviously high speed internet helps. The real thing to look for is low latency. AC band Wifi offers low latency. To make it work, all the devices need to support it. The router needs to be AC, and the laptop/tablet needs to be AC band. If your laptop is old, no problem, you can buy a AC Wifi dongle that plugs into a USB and bam, you got better performance. Of course, if you use a wired connection on the laptop, then you bypass the whole wifi thing entirely.
You can stream in your home for free with numerous apps. Google has one now, and I have used Splashtop for some time. Both of these also offer Android apps so you can stream to a tablet or phone. With Android you can plug up a mouse and keyboard, so you can turn a tablet in a super portable laptop, or desktop since you'd be streaming off that.
With this setup, you can have the power of a high end PC literally in the palm of your hand. Since these apps are free, you have nothing to lose by just testing them out. That goes for anybody in this thread who has a desktop and a laptop. Try it out for yourself.
Having AC band or better is not absolutely necessary, you may be able to get by with older standards depending on your equipment. So you may not even need to get on. But a good router is a worthy investment regardless. My router basically doubled my download speeds over my previous one because it can handle multiple streams of data at once. I significantly exceed the advertised speeds that my ISP is supposed to be offering me. :)
I actually ruined a laptop that I rendered with for about a year from render heat. Soon as I unplugged and shutdown the laptop for a day, after receiving the used HP 8470P Elitebook I had bought on eBay, the metal in the circuitry cooled off and split, breaking at least one circuit. It was an HP 8460P Elitebook.
The HP 8470P Elitebook though I rendered with for many more months but not as frequently because the render times were faster than the HP 8460P Elitebook and it didn't break after I shut it down after building my desktop this past January.
The newer smaller nanometer CPU & GPU designs are much more difficult to break from circuitry heating and cooling cycles.