recommended laptop for iray rendering
Chakradude
Posts: 260
My main graphics machine is an imac and its non upgradeable graphics card does not support iray. I am,However, about to buy a new pc laptop with about a $600 budget (I know, I know its a joke but all I can swing) never the less I am curious if anyone knows of newer laptops in this range that have a card that can support iray. Or should I just plan on using 3delight? I am hoping they are not fazing it out completely. If there is a discussion on the subject I could not find it.
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Daz' 3delight license was renewed the same time Iray was added, and 4.9 has an updated 3delight, so I think it will be around for a while longer.
Laptops are tricky -- you can get them with NVIDIA cards, but heat dissipation is harder in a laptop. I don't know that you can get a heavy-duty gaming laptop for that much, but you should be able to get one with a 4GB Nvidia card. You may need to keep an eye on the GPU temps to make sure it can handle the sustained usage you need for rendering.
thanks, I should be able to use those paramiters for a search.
In Windows 10 64 bit Nvidia Optimus (with Intel graphics) I seem to not be able to run 4.8 or 4.9 properly. Just thought I'd let you know before you invest the money in such a laptop.
You'll pay more for less with a laptop for rendering; it will be more convenient - sizewise, but less convenient to upgrade yourself; simply desktops are easy to workwith because of space, and the comparable components are either cheaper or not available for a laptop.
Of course that is a good point, but I use a laptop primarily for writing and since I don't even own a cel phone I dont think I could live with just two desktops- I need to be able to take it where ever.
That is a consern, are other people having this problem? I can run 4.8 and 4.9 on my old acer in windows 7 (no iray of course). I have no desire to upgrade to 10 unless I have to. Are there still laptops being sold with system 7? Seems unlikely.
A $600 laptop that will do DAZ Iray rendering, why not, I’m up for a challenge.
I would consider two options; 1). Assume any discreet GPU based laptop may not be able to handle your Iray scenes, therefore, count on doing your Iray renderings using CPU only and get the fastest CPU you can and don’t worry about the GPU, or 2). Find a discreet GPU laptop….the nVidia 940M seems to be a discreet video card in a laptop that you can currently find for $600. Here are two examples:
Acer Aspire V3-575G-57CN 15.6" Laptop ($550)
http://www.microcenter.com/product/454054/Aspire_V3-575G-57CN_156_Laptop_Computer_-_Steel_Black
Acer Aspire E5-491G-70PX 14" Laptop ($650)
http://www.microcenter.com/product/455897/Aspire_E5-491G-70PX_14_Laptop_Computer_-_Charcoal_Gray
The GT 940M is reported to feature 384 CUDA Cores and 4 GB VRAM but I could not confirm that.
If you can swing an SSD drive in the deal somehow, for the OS and DAZ, do it, you will be happy you did.
BTW, here is link to DAZ help regarding system requirements for DAZ4+
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530513-System-Recommendations-for-DAZ-Studio-4-
Good luck!
I am not seeing that on any of my test laptops (I have used 3) that I have used during the test cycle. I think it depends on which Intel GMA is being used and if the drivers are, or are able to be, up to date. I will note that only one of them, and I would not recommend it for other reasons, costs under $600.
I highly recommend saving a little longer, spending the extra and getting a 960M with 4GB of Video Ram. You can get in under $1000 and you will definitely notice the difference. (And that generally means a quad core i7 as well.)
Also note that Gaming laptops tend to have better cooling, and that is important when it comes to rendering.
Daz spooky is right, you can not get a Iray laptop with a nvidia dedicated card with at least 4 gigs of video ram for under $1000. I would look at refurbished laptops from newegg or ebay but only deal with reputable sellers. I have bought stuff from refurbishers and it was great but sometimes they do not send you what they put in discription. I would probablely go with an amd apu laptop and render with 3delight and reality with a amd ati setup versus trying to do this on a budget nvidia laptop. Try to get a laptop that you can replace the dvd slot with a internal 2nd HD drive bay that way you can install a SSD for operating system and place your daz studio program and library on 2nd HD. Daz studio is very hard on ssd's due to the nature of the program and the content will overwhelm you space and ssd's do not work well if they are fill too close to capcity. Hope this helps you.
One other option. (Sounds kind of silly, but bear with me.) You can run DS on most notebooks and some tablets, for as little as $250, then save your scene to Google Drive/Dropbox/One Drive, use your favorite remote desktop software and render it on your desktop. :) As long as your content is installed on both, it doesn't have to be rendered where it is created. :)
I've actually just bought a laptop, and it has a 960M or whatever; it wont get used for rendering, partly because I have better cards in the main machine - but also because heat has the potential to effect laptops more, and wearing out something that I paid more for at a faster rate is not going to happen.
I've bought it for its portability and carrying around a desktop is doable on occasions but likely to result in a damage computer in the longer term; correct tool for the job.:)
I had this but is a workstation:
the one they are offering on the Charcoal Gray is a 2GB card
I use a republic of gamers Asus 24G laptop with NVIDIA 980m card I halso have a 980 on my 32G 3 yr old tower.
Yes that model appears to have 2GB video memory, but the 940M does support 4GB. Acer does have a few models with 940M and 4GB, such as the E5-573G-56RG ($650 list). Checkout the list of Acer laptops here http://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/laptops
From DAZ Help on recommended system requirements page https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530513-System-Recommendations-for-DAZ-Studio-4-
it is worth noting the following:
"GPU memory has no direct effect on render time, it simply determines how big a file you can work with. We found that 2GB can handle a single character with a medium sized environment, 4GB can handle around 4 characters and a scene so we recommend 4GB and up."
"Even entry level cards with 300 or 400 GPU/Cuda cores are substantially faster at rendering than current high end CPUs."
Given the above the 940M with 4GB will likely be best option and still close to $600 for laptop.
Chakradude
Theres probably going to be lots of rubbish in this post but hey! I am using my 10 year old Imac 27" which has a new ssd 1TB SSD drive, 16 gigs of ram and runs High Sierrra. It has the pre installed graphics as below...
AMD Radeon HD 6770M:
Chipset Model: AMD Radeon HD 6770M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 512 MB
Vendor: AMD (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x6740
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C0170F-175
VBIOS Version: 113-C29501-103
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.560
This machine allows me to render very acceptable images using Iray, its not exactly lightening fast but in maybe an hour I can obtain renders that suit me as a hobbyist. Obviously if your looking for a pro set up this is not for you. But if your happy with a pretty useful means to render, then you could go buy a refurbed Imac of a simialr vintage, maybe even upgrade the ram to 32GB though not sure this would make sense. Also before I replced the dead HDD with the SSD it was working fine with only a HDD. Reckon for about £300 to £500 you could get a pretty good machine and obtain good renders.
Chakradude
Theres probably going to be lots of rubbish in this post but hey! I am using my 10 year old Imac 27" which has a new ssd 1TB SSD drive, 16 gigs of ram and runs High Sierrra. It has the pre installed graphics as below...
AMD Radeon HD 6770M:
Chipset Model: AMD Radeon HD 6770M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 512 MB
Vendor: AMD (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x6740
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C0170F-175
VBIOS Version: 113-C29501-103
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.560
This machine allows me to render very acceptable images using Iray, its not exactly lightening fast but in maybe an hour I can obtain renders that suit me as a hobbyist. Obviously if your looking for a pro set up this is not for you. But if your happy with a pretty useful means to render, then you could go buy a refurbed Imac of a simialr vintage, maybe even upgrade the ram to 32GB though not sure this would make sense. Also before I replced the dead HDD with the SSD it was working fine with only a HDD. Reckon for about £300 to £500 you could get a pretty good machine and obtain good renders.
I've been running a Lenovo Y50 for several years, and it's been dying the death the last 6 months or so. The touchpad is flaky, the keyboard is giving me trouble, and I had to replace the drive about 6 weeks ago. So I've been looking - and this month Costco has an MSI gaming laptop on sale: I7 cpu, 8 GB rtx 2070, 16 GB, with a 512 GB ssd and a 1 TB second drive (MSI GE75). I picked one up yesterday but haven't had the time to fire it up yet.
This is primarily a bit-bucket for dragging files around, watching videos, web surfing, and listening to music; I've a tower for real 3D work, but this will come in handy for experimentation.