Hi,
Please,
i’m about to buy à laptop. I want to learn 3D animation. I don’t have a lot of money, and i found a computer with 16GB RAM, but only 2 GB for the graphic card.
Do you think i will be able to use use blender ?
Hi.
Regarding Blender 2.8 onwards:
For Blender in general (OpenGL), you may be able to open Blender, but 2GB vRAM it’s very little for these days then you may not be able to do much rendering in Cycles and Eevee.
In the following link the “Minimum” requirements only guarantee that you can open Blender without it being closed, but what really guarantees you to be able to work on it is the “Recommended” requirement:
Edit:
Edited the original message because I had gotten confused with another family of nvidia GPUs. The main problem with that card is the 2GB of vRAM that you say it has. 4GB is the minimum recommended for Eevee and Cycles these days.
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I was running for years on a laptop with a gtx 680m bought used about 5 years ago for 800 euros then. I would say that or something like that, is minimum these days. I sold my used laptop MSI GT70 0NE for 250 euros. I bought a replacement Lenovo Legion Y740 with an RTX 2070 gpu for 1200 euros, a few months ago. My point is maybe your money will be better spent on carefully selected used equipment, both my deals were about half price of competitive new systems on the market at the time. I also hope the prices help you. Good luck!
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From what I gathered after 5 minutes of searching, the MX230 is a DX12 compliant chip based on the Geforce 10 series architecture, so it should be fully compatible with Blender.
The only question is how well it’ll run. Based on the benchmarks I read, it’ll get him buy, but things might get pretty chunkity once scene complexity starts ramping up.
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Sorry, I had gotten confused with another family of nvidia GPUs. I have edited the original message to avoid confusion. Still not recommended with only 2GB of vRAM.
Thank you.
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You can run Blender. It looks like I only have 2.2 GB of GPU Memory. You get used to what you can and can’t do.
One thing I would look at is if you can do GPU rendering with Cycles. That is a feature I miss.
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I know where you’re coming from. When I came across this thread, the first thing I thought of was the old Geforce 2 MX that came out about 20 years or so odd years ago. Guess they brought back then brand.
- Blender.org benchmarks, have it tested, so it works and you can compare figures with other gpu
- Also note that I think that the RTX series (20xx and up) have a significant advantage of OPTIX which immediately means great viewport denoising at less than 100 samples (sometimes much less… 30 or so).
Also RTX and Optix are ongoing aggressive development and you can expect more improvements in performance with software updates, I would think. - Finally note that if you do get rather slow Nvidia CUDA gpu, you can improve the performance dramatically with E-Cycles rendering at a fraction of the time, that I can testify from personal experience it was the reason I was able to keep my GTX 680M laptop for so long! - see this animation example with 680M.
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Thank you very much for your answers,
So i started to look for used laptops, and I finally found one with :
16 Gb RAM
Intel i5
NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti 4GB
I’ve done my research about this graphics card, some say that it is good enough, others thinks that it’s not.
I would like to know your opinion about two things :
-is a GTX 1050 ti good enough or should i search a 1650 ti at least ?
-is a intel i5 processor good enough or should i search for a i7 at least ?
What model exactly?
How much knowledge do you have about Blender or other similar programs? What kinds of jobs do you intend to do in Blender?
I think the hardware requirement depends on what you use Blender for.
Edit:
You said in the first post that you want to learn 3D animation, I guess you are a beginner. I think 1050 Ti 4GB will be fine to start with and for your first animations. Do you really need a laptop? You keep in mind that render animation for long periods produce a lot of heat that must be dissipated properly. With the 1050 Ti, render at 1080p a frame in Eevee can take about 10 seconds or up to a couple of minutes. In Cycles a frame can take from 5min to 30min (hopefully). So at ~24 frames per second, you do the calculations about how much work the laptop will have.
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E-cycles costs 39€ , it will have more an effect than the difference between these two gpus. If you can buy the 1650 and the add-on… better, better still the rtx 2060, the entry level rtx, optix.
Edit:
I’m afraid I mis-quoted the price. I googled to give advice quickly and did not notice the price is for a “nebulae” edition… - not what you would want for a standalone installation, most likely. Matthieu the owner and author of E-Cycles does however offer good sales, several times a year, as I recall.
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