Need help choosing a laptop that will give me faster render times
galactica1981
Posts: 1,251
I'm looking to buy a new laptop in the near future and I was hoping I could get some advice on the specs to look for. My current computer is 4 years old, and the render times are way too long for my taste. Is there any laptop that could finish most renders within just a minute or two? I am not currently using IRAY. Thanks!
Post edited by galactica1981 on
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I'm sure there is...but it wouldn't be inexpensive.
Rendering will take time...and to get low times (without examples of what you are trying to achieve is even harder) you need to have top end hardware and in a laptop that means very costly.
Something in the $2000 to $4000 range...often referred to as 'mobile workstations'.
I've looked and this is the best value for the money:
http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B015PYZI8E/ref=gno_cart_title_0?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
and you'd might want to replace the SSHHD with a 500GB or 1TB SSD (plus $225 - $500) and RAM with 16GB (plus $75) so that's at $1100 now just for a nVidia 960 and Quad Core Skylake i7. You probably want to go cheaper and wait for the equivalent of an nVidia Titan to be scaled to laptop form so maybe by the end of 2017.
There are a couple nearly as good laptops if you search Amazon with nVidia 950s that can be had for like about $600.
However, you can probably buy a used desktop computer with those specs for about $500 and then replace the HHD with an SSD of a size you need.
All-in-all though, since you don't do iRay, nVidia shouldn't be a consideration and you should buy the nicest laptop that uses Skylake architecture - preferable an i7 Quad Core with 16GB RAM (you can upgrade that yourself if the OEM seller is being ridiculous with RAM prices). Important is Windows 10 and DirectX12. Those should do your typical 3DL renders as fast or faster than skimping on CPU and RAM to buy a better nVidia card.
I've looked if anything has changed with laptop upgrade technology and no, not really - you mostly get stuck with the CPU and GPU you bought with minor upgrades possible that aren't worth the expense so be very sure you don't want to do nVidia iRay in the future. If anything, you can upgrade less than you could in the past. You'll really be only using iRay in DAZ Studio unless nVidia decides to port it to DirectX 12 / Vulkan / Metal. Of course if you are creating a lot renders or animations that use iRay you probably want nVidia video card.
RAM & SSD are different since they can be used on other machines.
Thanks. This is a bit much for me to understand. What exactly is SSHHD or SSD? To be clear, the render times don't have to be 2 minutes. It's just that some of my renders (the ones that have 4 different figures and thus 4 different hair pieces) are taking 30 minutes to finish. To just cut that time in half would be wonderful. And I may eventually use IRAY in the future, but right now it's not important.
I think I spelled SSHHD wrong but it's a solid state drive combined with a hard drive.
SSD is a solid state drive and can make a scene in DAZ Studio go from taking 10 minutes to open to take 1 minute to open.
If you can afford it I'd definitely budget for an SSD. I am going to buy a 480GB one in the next month or so for $104. Buying an 1TB SSHHD with say, eg, a 64GB SSD integrated would cost about that much so basically I get 1/2 the storage for the same money but so much faster.
The SSD will only speed up load times and save to disk it will not speed up renders.
Well 30 minutes to me isn't bad with 4 figures & 4 hairpieces; you don't say if your current laptop has an nVidia card or ATI card which would both be faster than a 4 year old integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 or Intel HD Graphics 4000. I can see a QuadCore i7 Skylake CPU/GPU possibly cutting that render time down to 15 - 20 minutes if you are currently doing renders with 4 year old Intel CPU/Intel HD Graphics, especially if it's only a single or dual core i3 or i5 Intel CPU/GPU. It'd still wouldn't add that much cost to have an nVidia 950 or 960 GPU on the laptops you consider and those are DirectX 12 compatible HW too so improvements will be coming for those.
Theoretically this is true, but after just upgrading my system and doing multiple tests on two different systems, I found upgrading from a platter style drive to an SSD cut my render time in half. If looking for a budget notebook for doing 3D you might want to consider the 'gaming' notebooks by MSI, Asus, and others. I purchased one from Lenovo because the video card came with 4GB ram (Nvidia 960.) It's not a powerhouse but at the rate things are changing recently and looking into the immediate future, I couldn't justify spending as much on a new system but rather get something reasonable now and plan on upgrading sooner then I might otherwise.
I wouldn't expect an ssd to cut render time significantly, UNLESS you don't have enough vram for the scene and don't have enough cpu ram, such that the system needs to use the hard drive
I am ordering 16GB RAM from 8GB soon so an SSD will contribute less speed up besides loading and saving but what GED & fastbike1 say are true.
I've noticed that sometimes (not quite sure exactly which conditions trigger this behavior) that rendering seems to become a 'background' task and gets shuffled off to the swap long before memory runs low. But, yeah, that's what I'd expect too...although no matter how it's getting there, once the render hits 'virtual memory' it will crawl with a platter drive.
Expect to pay more money for less power than you would a desktop. Expect possible heating issues from prolonged renders. Expect more wear and tear on components which are smaller and sometimes underpowered to compensate for power requirements. If you don't need the laptop for production you can get a far more capable desktop for less as a rule.
A SSD can significantly increase render speed.....if the total render time is small. Caching and set-up time becomes more dominant if rendering lots of quick, small images (like for small animations.) A SSD being used for that stuff could considerably speed up the total time (over several hundred individual renders.)
But if your renders take more than a few seconds to complete, the SSD isn't going to make much, if any, impact.
GPUs in most laptops are not upgradable. So if you want your investment to provide returns for some time in future I would suggest considering the recent (R2 and above) Alienware range of laptops as they support external graphics amplifier for desktop graphics cards. That way you don't have to upgrade your entire laptop whenever you want to upgrade the GPU.
Actually, at least when shopping on Amazon & Wal*Mart the difference in price between similarly equipped laptops & desktops is insignificant. The bigger problem is the laptop you can't upgrade the GPU, the CPU, the MB or any of those things. Of course you can in a Desktop but usually doing so will cost more than a new PC anyway so there you go. Unless you have thousands to use in building a fancy rig with multiple GPUs not that big a difference between laptop and desktop.