I realize wondering about laptops for Blender is an often asked questions. And I realize this because I’ve looked through the threads, but I’m still coming away with questions.
First of all, I need 100+ gigs of ram. It seems like any laptop with a decent 4000 series Nvidia GPU is going to max out well below that. Is there an exception out there?
Second, about those Nvidia laptop GPUs? How comparable are they the desktop GPU of the same number.
Which brings me to 3: are the new m4 Macbook Pros actually better than laptops with Nvidia GPUs. Most of the comparisons I’ve seen seem to be comparing the Macbook Pro to desktop setups but how would it look head to head with a nvidia laptop?
And lastly, what about the laptop+render farm option? My renders often depend of super massive alembic files. Would this be a big problem for a render farm interface?
MacBook M4 Max is close to laptop RTX 4080 and about 30% slower than RTX 4090 in Cycles:
Look at Blender Open Data:
It may be different in Eevee. I wouldn’t be surprised if the M4 Max comes close to the RTX 4090 (laptop) due to much faster memory access.
Note that laptop RTX 4090 has only 16 GB of memory, while the RTX 4080 has 12 GB.
There is 48GB of unified memory in the base configuration of the MacBook, much of which (say 2/3) can be used by the GPU. With a 128GB cofiguration, there could be almost 100GB available for the MacBook’s GPU. This is unachievable not only for PC laptops (leaving aside the use of slow RAM) but for virtually all desktop PC graphics cards.
Another thing is that the MacBook doesn’t slow down on battery even at maximum load and runs on battery much longer than a PC laptop.
Wow thanks for these details.
If this is the case, then it seems like the new MacBook is clearly the best laptop option. I’m surprised more hasn’t been made of this.
Probably yes, until you start comparing prices. You can buy a gaming PC laptop much cheaper than a MacBook, and Apple upgrades are absurdly expensive (RAM, SSD). On the other hand, you’re paying for build quality, components - screen, touchpad, speakers; no other computer has near 600 GB/s memory, Thunderbolt5, etc, etc, and of course macOS. This is equipment that should earn its keep.
