I am simply trying to make sure that the decisions I made are fine for Blender work laptop are worthy. I am a hobbyist Blender user. I do not intend to make money out of it but I would still like this laptop to support as many future versions of Blender as possible.
From the previous experience, I chose not to buy AMD processor or GPU. My current machine is finding it hard to run Blender and it is AMD all over.
So it will be either i5 or i7 for me, if possible 10th gen. What I really wanted to ask is about the graphics card. I thought I would simply say Nvidia card. But looks like there are many categories in it.
I hope you are clear about what I am trying to do. I am from India and it is really hard to buy a high-end laptop for a common man. It would be very nice of you if you can suggest possible moderate hardware. Thanks.
Additional info :
If everything goes fine, I intend to buy the following Dell model. It would nice to know whether it has any blind spots. I will be using Windows 10 and Ubuntu dual boot. Hope I can run Blender on both OS.
Nvidia’s a safer choice for BLender as far as i know.
Maybe that explains the problems you’re having with AMD.
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For me, Bodhi Linux plays animation at a higher FPS than Windows 10.
(but my laptop’s slow, so it’s still slow fps).
So dual boot sounds like a good idea (just don’t break your Ubuntu like i did :|)
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You should have this much VRAM depending on what you’re doing in Blender:
~1GB for every 8 million triangles
500MB for Cycles kernel
64MB for each 4k texture (8bit x RGBA)
200MB for each 4k HDR texture (32bit per channel)
The better a CPUs single threaded performance, the better it’ll be for physics simulation & most modeling tasks/tools.
The better a CPUs multi-threaded performance, the better it’ll be for rendering/baking/multitasking.
[https://polycount.com/discussion/173350/upgrading-or-building-a-new-pc-this-is-the-thread-for-you]
^This has other info on PC specs for Blender, even tho you’re not building a PC.
Oh, also, building a PC will probably give you better value for your money.
You can always upgrade it later.
But it’s not portable, and you need to get a monitor and either headphones or a speaker, and learn how to build it, etc.
I’m guessing it all depends on what you wanna do in Blender, tho. Do wanna do:
use super duper 4K textures?
super-high-poly sculpting? (P.S. I think I heard other 3D apps are more optimized for sculpting. But I don’t know if they’re free like Blender).
photo-realistic architecture pics?
3D animation or just pictures?
low-poly npr?
…Also… Getting a TB3 Laptop now, and buying an eGPU and GPU later IS an option BUT from what I remember, it costs a lot, you may have to trouble-shoot it, and the GPU will be bottlenecked. Maybe the technology will improve when thunderbolt 4 comes out? I dunno.
Thanks. I having been using Blender for almost a year now. I can do some 3D modelling and materials. At this level, I try to create models from tutorials and other inspiration website like Dribble and YouTube ( tutorials ).
My next goal is to do some intro animations. I tried doing smoke splash but my last machine was not strong enough for that. Hopefully, I can do some sculpting when I advance enough. To be honest, there are no goals, I try to learn as much as I can.