MacBook Pro vs Gaming Laptop for 2020
stargazersix
Posts: 4
in The Commons
Hi all,
I've been doing a lot of research and have read through the forums but can't find an updated post on this topic. So please forgive me for beating a dead horse.
I'm currently using a 2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB. Rendering things in 3Dlight is so-so but rendering in Iray takes forever. The machine is slowing down anyway so I've been thinking of buying a new laptop anyway.
I understand that Macs will always be limited in terms of rendering with Daz which is why I've been researching Windows based laptops.
I'm considering a MacBook Pro 2020 with the 16gb of RAM, an Acer Predator Helios 300, and an HP Envy Ultrabook.
I definitely need a laptop because I'm pretty much always working remotely. Also, I hope to eventually create graphic comics through Daz which is why I want something with a little more graphic proecessing than my old Mac.
I've read about the pros and cons of gaming laptops and am hesitant because of the fan noise and bad battery life which is why I'm considering the HP. But I've been a Mac user for years and am also hesitant to switch back to Windows.
Any thoughts on the machines I listed above if all I'm needing is basic, faster iray renders?
Thank you!
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Comments
Do you need to render on the move? if not an option might be a Mac laptop for general work, including scene setup, and a Windows desktop as a render machine.
Does your budget include selling your current 2015 Macbook?
If you are keeping it and is still good for all your woork activities, then as richard said, do consider buying a desktop.
If you are going to need to sell it and really want to do IRAY then as far as i know a gaming laptop (with nvidia RTX) will be better.
Now, i might be wrong, but i think some pople use DAZ+Other (like blender) and avoid iray. Consider investigating that.
Edit Add: About those models of gaming laptops i cannot say much except that HP Envy do sounds better tan Acer. I'm currently waiting(in customs) a new gaming laptop but is a budget(1k) laptop from MSI with only an RTX2060. If you are comparing models that compete in price with a macbook pro then you have a lot more marging. One thing for sure. Laptop rendering makes things hot. Battery life on gaming laptops, is a problem only when you are making use of the gaming GPU....BUT since you are coming form Macs and those have grate battery life in general is very likely you will notice that difference. You will miss how your machine was built (a little less with a high end ones, but you will notice is not an Apple machine). Now, your transition from OSX to windows will probably take you more time, and i don't mean learning windows (that you maybe already use) i mean not having OSX at all. I used mac for a while and had go back mostly for work (and budget too), i was not happy.
All recent macbooks are terrible for any serious use, in anything. They have splashy stats but awful cooling so they throttle down far below expected performance.
If you specifically want a laptop for iRay rendering then get a decent gaming laptop with a decent 20xx GPU (there are many 2070 equipped ones that are very good choices in the same price range as the utterly horrible Macbook pro).
Unfortunately the OEM's are really taking their sweet time on releasing Ryzen 4000 laptops with high end Nvidia GPU's which could be expected to have much better performance than equivalent Intel ones and be slightly cheaper.
I did this for a few years until my iMac aged out of usefulness, at which point I purchased a really nice windows computer and no longer hassle with mac. It's a little clunky but works fine. One nice thing is that you can save your scene, kick the render off and start on the next scene (or do postwork using the non-render machine) while the render machine does it's thing.
Since Apple is going to dump both intel instruction set CPUs both AMD & nVidia GPU in future models I would wait until they have their new 'all-ARM' models available to purchase. While performance will likely lag, their hardware already lags top of the line gaming PCs and laptops quite significantly. Maybe their all-ARM in-house approach will lead to competitive prices for a change though.
Why would you think that? They will have the R&D of the new CPU's and GPU's to recoup and the shrinking consumer base locked into their "ecosystem." I doubt they will release a Pro variant of the Macbook on ARM, what software would it even be validated for? I also doubt the price of the Macbook will come down much. It will be a thin and light probably comparable in performance to a chromebook priced something like an XPS.
You have to make a difficult choice. If you wish to use Iray, that render engine is mainly for GPU rendering, and specifically Nvidia. This is a serious problem for any machine lacking Nvidia, but almost impossible for Mac. The issue here is that Nvidia stopped providing drivers to Apple a while back. In fact their entire Turing generation, all 2000 and 1600 series cards, do NOT work on Apple products at all. You might think you could get a Pascal GPU, but the catch with that is Iray requires new drivers, drivers that Apples does not provide. So you can only use Daz 4.10 as that was last driver that Iray supports for Mac. And unless you already have 4.10 on your machine, good luck obtaining it from Daz. You could beg customer support for it, but whether they give it to you is up to them. Even if you do have 4.10, you would be missing out on a lot of recent Iray and Daz features. It is a bad situation all around.
Your other options would be to export into other render engines. But this task is not so easy, either. Even though Daz just released a bunch of bridges, they still have limits on what they can do. You will still need to do a fair amount of work just on the export process. I'm not saying you can't, people here do it, but know what you are signing up for.
Basically anything that is not a Nvidia is going to require you to jump through hoops to get anywhere. Whether that is right or wrong is irrelevant, we all have to do deal with it.
Just how remote are you talking? You could have some options depending on what you do. You could build a nice desktop, one that would be much cheaper than any laptop, and use that render remotely from you Mac, laptop, or even tablet/phone. You could set it up as a remote server, or use it through remote streaming. Streaming would depend a lot on the networks you have. I have used streaming a lot, from inside my own home as well as on trips to the family home hundreds of miles from my desktop. So I can tell you from my own experience it is possible.
If you stick to CPU rendering with 3DL, then that changes things. Any decent CPU should run 3DL quite fine today, with multicore Ryzens and Threadrippers leading the way. So if you feel like you can make use of 3DL, then that is another option. But 3DL has its drawbacks, too. Many items today release without any 3DL shaders. You can convert materials, but this is not straight forward. There is a converter in the store that helps, and Aweshader opens up the 3DL renderer to improve performance.
So, as I said, you have some big decisions to make.
Hi all,
Thank you all for your valuable insights and input. I really appreciate it! To your collective point, there will be some tradeoffs, but the more I hear, the less I'm convinced that I'll get a MacBook. Anyway, they've become a bit stale in my opinion, so maybe it's time to switch things up.
After hearing what you guys say, I think I'm now leaning back toward maybe a good ultrabook (so there's good cross-functionality, since I do a lot of stuff that doesn't require a massive graphics card), and maybe sticking to 3DL, which has definitely worked so far. I think I'd like to just make sure it can run a little faster, because on my old MacBook, anything more than a simple scene takes quite a while to render.
Thank you guys!