Thank you very much for your supportive replies. This really motivates me to continue making educational content.
I also updated the article to mention the Blender version I am using. Thanks for the heads up about the names of the buttons.
I never thought of these new political developments to be so relevant to this article I wrote! Just, wow! Indeed getting newer computers will get more difficult, I guess.
Advice for you: I am not sure what exactly are you using your laptop for, but RTX 3060 Laptop GPU is pretty good. As you read in my article, I don’t even have a GPU, and I am doing more or less fine. I mean people were doing just fine in 2012 when my laptop was somewhat of a cutting edge at the time. New technology made us get results faster, but it did not exactly “enable” us to do new things. In my opinion, there has been more “ground-breaking” developments in Software side, not in the Hardware side. Since the inventions of GPUs in circa 1999, there has not beed a groundbreaking new hardware: They have only gotten faster. There has been new hardware like programmable circuits (FPGA), but that’s more interesting for people in engineer fields, not for us 3D guys. In short, rejoice because your hardware is pretty darn good. I would say, unless the laptop breaks down, it should be quite sufficient for all your use cases for a quite a while. My lower estimate is 15 years. My upper estimate is 20, maybe 25 years.
I mean imagine 10 years down the road we get quantum desktop computers which can simulate all the world’s polygon and render in realtime. Now we will be thirsting over getting our hands on one of these new shiny quantum computers. And yet, for all the reasons why you are using your laptop at this given moment, you will be able to continue to use your laptop in 10 years down the road, as well. This means: You won’t be able to simulate all the world’s polygons on your current laptop, but you did not want to do it in 2025 anyways, why would you suddenly want to do it in 2035? Just because some new computer tech can do it? Sometimes meditating over what we need and realizing that that was never our goal, is more helpful than getting a new device.
New developments in tech will always try to make you feel that you need this newest hardware, but no, you don’t really need them. It is generally more like “nice to have”.
Second advice for you: If you also have a strong CPU, you can use both your CPU and GPU in a smart way to speed up your animation renders (or any render where you need to render more than a ample amount of frame, shots etc.) →
Say you have a 10 minute animation. You copy your file and set 1st file to render the first 5 minutes in GPU. Then you open the 2nd file and you set it to render the last 5 minutes with the CPU. Then you start both files to render at the same time.
The CPU is generally used in just more than rendering. Whenever the GPU focused file prepares the new frame to render, it will also use your CPU. During that time, the other file who is rendering in CPU will slow down. But if you only render in 1 file with GPU only, then there will be a lot of time where your CPU is underused. If you can configure things in a good balance, then you will achieve actual CPU + GPU rendering. Using this method, you laptop will turn into a render farm powerhouse.
Also you may have noticed, Blender already has as GPU + CPU setting for rendering. But a CPU is generally slower than a GPU, hence trying utilize them both in Blender settings will actually result in a slower render time. However in the method I described above, you are using each device in a seperate file to render separate things. This way you will use both devices to their full extent.
I hope this helps. Thanks again for your supportive words. I hope it all works out with the tariffs situation. Happy Blending!
