If you need to choose the most striking evidence of progress in computer technology, convincing not only in the eyes of specialists, but also for the general public, then this, without a doubt, will be a mobile gadget - a smartphone or tablet. At the same time, a more conservative class of devices - laptops - has come a long way: from an addition to a desktop PC, with the limitations of which you have to put up with it in order to be able to work on the road, to a full-fledged replacement for a bulky desktop. The sizes are getting smaller and the performance is increasing. Many users now do not need any smart technology other than a laptop and a smartphone, because compact computers weighing less than 2 kg are suitable for most everyday needs. Even demanding games, once tied to hundreds of watts of tower PCs, have become commonplace on laptop screens.
The only area left where desktops are not inferior to their unconditional leadership is work applications for digital content creation. Unlike relatively light software for mere mortals - office suites and web browsers - as well as games, the requests of which can be easily adjusted to the capabilities of hardware, professional video editing tools and, even more so, 3D rendering (and to some extent even processing tools photos) eat up all the performance resources that are available. It is believed, and not without reason, that using them on a mobile computer without connection to the rendering farm in the server room is possible only for lack of better options or when it is difficult to call the computer truly mobile without blushing. But how long will the status quo last?
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We note right away that boundless optimism is alien to us in this matter: for work tasks with high demands on time and quality of results, the situation cannot be changed radically, and a fixed workstation or a dedicated farm will always reign in the commercial sphere. However, let's not close our eyes to the fact that the laptop has already become quite a wealthy tool for the production of visual content on a small scale. Processing photos from a digital camera, graphic design in 2D, or cutting video in moderate resolution and without sophisticated compression formats - all this is in the teeth of a standard portable machine, sometimes even without a discrete GPU. The road of development lies not in these extremes, but somewhere between the YouTube video and Hollywood, and there are now plenty of opportunities for manufacturers to take the next big step forward.
This article focuses on two related tasks. First, we intend to find out what laptops are capable of in work applications, and on a large scale in terms of software resource intensity - from casual one-button photo processing to video editing and 3D rendering at a commercial level. And the test hardware for this purpose was also chosen as diverse as possible - several laptops running antagonistic operating systems (Windows and macOS), with different processors (from two to six cores) and graphics (integrated Intel or discrete GPUs of various levels). Such an approach, although it does not pretend to be scientific and clear recommendations that 3DNews visitors are used to seeing, will allow us to mark several reference points in a variety of possible combinations of hardware and working software, and if readers support our excursion into the field of professional applications, then in the future we will direct our efforts towards broader and at the same time focused research.
On the other hand, we will pay attention to the latest initiative of the well-known NVIDIA company in the field of mobile PCs, which ultimately prompted us to work on this review. Relatively recently, at the end of May, Computex announced from the podium that a galaxy of mobile computers under the RTX Studio brand is moving to the shelves, thanks to which NVIDIA is going to democratize and at the same time completely crush the mobile workstation market. Has NVIDIA decided to become a laptop manufacturer, and if not, what is the RTX Studio program really and what benefits does it bring to digital content creators?
NVIDIA RTX Studio laptops
To be honest, when the author of the article first heard about the RTX Studio program, but did not have time to read the press release, he really thought that NVIDIA had released laptops under its own brand, and was not even too surprised by this news. Whatever one may say, NVIDIA is no stranger to bold experiments, the company continually seeks to penetrate into seemingly uncharacteristic market niches, appreciates such concepts as "ecosystem" and "vertical integration" and, in general, moves from chip production to finished consumer and professional products. For example, rack trusses and freestanding workstations for rendering and GP-GPU "green" are already being delivered directly to customers. Let's not guess what decisions NVIDIA will make in the future, but at the moment it has a different goal.
RTX Studio is a certification of computers from various manufacturers for compliance with certain hardware configurations, fault tolerance and other performance characteristics related to workloads. Moreover, among the NVIDIA-approved systems there are not only laptops, but also 3-in-1 machines and desktop PCs. All computers have a GeForce RTX 2060 or higher graphics card up to TITAN RTX, and the list of other components includes an Intel Core i7 or i9 CPU, at least 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. Systems with Quadro graphics (RTX 3000, 4000, and 5000) are classified as a separate category of workstations - stationary or mobile.
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A total of 27 laptops from eight manufacturers have already received the RTX Studio sticker: Acer, ASUS, Dell, GIGABYTE, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Razer. Retail prices for devices start at $1599 for the base configuration, while the cost of more advanced models, especially those equipped with a Quadro graphics card, can easily reach several thousand dollars.
Thus, exclusively from the hardware side, the RTX Studio program serves as a filter that excludes unbalanced configurations from many systems that claim a high level of performance - for example, without a margin of RAM and SSD - and products in general of dubious quality, i.e. j. certification implies verification and testing of hardware by NVIDIA.
However, in order to be honored with the RTX Studio brand, a laptop or all-in-one must also have a reasonably good display. The minimum requirements on NVIDIA's website only indicate 1080p or 4K resolution, but from other documents it can be concluded that the RTX Studio laptop should stand out from its peers in one way or another - be it the G-SYNC function or other features that are more significant in professional context: color gamut, wide dynamic range, PANTONE certification, etc. It turns out that the presence of the RTX Studio badge guarantees a certain level of image quality for a particular machine, but does not completely close this issue. We would like to see a stricter list of screen performance requirements, as NVIDIA is not just focusing on raw CPU and GPU performance, but aims to make it easier for visual content creators to choose a platform.
At the same time, the RTX Studio program is not limited to computer certification and includes an extensive set of software that complements the capabilities of common application design, development and debugging tools. All APIs and SDKs included in , can be divided into three categories: video and still image processing tools, packages for 3D modeling and programming (libraries of materials, profilers, SDKs for various graphic APIs, etc.), as well as, of course, libraries for a complete training cycle and application of neural networks.
Finally, specifically for production applications, NVIDIA is developing a separate branch of GPU drivers for Windows 10, which was previously called Creator Ready, and now also dubbed Studio. However, the list of video cards supported by it is not limited to participants in the RTX Studio program and applies to formally obsolete models of the 10th series, starting with the GeForce RTX 1050. According to the developers, the "studio" driver contains all the optimizations for games inherent in Game Ready releases, but is subject to stability testing in key production applications (including running multiple applications at the same time) and unlocks some features not available in the game driver, such as 10-bit per channel color support in Adobe applications, previously only available in the Quadro driver.
In addition to this, Studio promises a certain increase in productivity in the corresponding software. In our benchmarks, we did not find a statistically significant difference in the results between the Game Ready driver and Studio, but we will not rule out the possibility that we were simply looking for an advantage in the wrong place, but in software that went beyond our test methodology, when using specific functions or on On other hardware, the Studio driver can actually use GPU resources more efficiently.
Also note that the Game Ready and Studio releases are numbered the same way, but the pro pack is updated much less frequently than the game pack due to the fact that its releases are tied to major content creation app updates. At the time of writing, version 431.86 was available on September 436.48th, although the latest game driver XNUMX was released on October XNUMXst. Considering how much a game's performance (or simply its ability to run) can be affected by a graphics card driver, users of RTX Studio computers will sometimes need to juggle drivers to distract themselves from work.
Here are all the key information about the RTX Studio software that will help the buyer of a workhorse with a new generation of GPU on board and, we hope, will help to make a choice in favor of the right configuration. What remains to be seen is how NVIDIA's professional applications campaign fits into our broader research topic of laptop performance in digital content processing software, and how it could ultimately affect the range of tasks that mainstream laptops are already capable of, or , on the contrary, are still considered the prerogative of stationary workstations.
It is no accident that NVIDIA is now striving to increase its already vast holdings in the professional market. Already at the time when the first graphics cards based on Turing chips were introduced (then only for desktop computers), there was not the slightest reason to doubt that the innovative features of the RTX family - hardware-accelerated ray tracing and data processing by neural networks (inference) - sooner or late they will find their way into work applications and will be in demand in this area no less, if not more, than in games. The last statement could sound ambiguous, given that most game developers are not yet in a hurry to integrate ray tracing and image scaling using DLSS into their products, and a wave of high-profile releases under the RTX On flag will cover gamers not earlier than at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. However, you need to understand how the professional software market differs from the gaming industry.
On the one hand, it is more conservative: tools for creating digital content are expensive for both developers and buyers. Certain software has been used for years, maintained for years, workflows fine-tuned, and users are not in a hurry to upgrade to the next version solely for the sake of new enticing features. On the other hand, this market quickly accepts useful initiatives and often stops supporting outdated or simply inconvenient technologies overnight, without worrying about customers being left behind. Game creators have to take into account that there are not so many owners of GeForce RTX accelerators yet, and after all, each studio needs to do its own part of the work to use the “beams” and DLSS instead of simply taking a fresh build of Unreal Engine or Unity. On the contrary, working software for 3D modeling or video editing is bundled into a single infrastructure with a mass of common components - SDKs, renderers, codecs, etc. The owners (or teams of open source developers) of these tools could not ignore the potential of specialized blocks in new NVIDIA chips. . It can take a long time to integrate into programs with big names, but once the support from the software community reaches a critical mass, new features will be fixed in it forever and will quickly find wide application. Indeed, unlike games, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and neural networks in work tasks do not cause brakes, but, on the contrary, bring a net gain in performance.
And fortunately, some working programs can already put RT-blocks and tensor cores of Turing chips into action. Some of them are still only in beta status (like the Arnold 3D renderer with Turing support and GPU acceleration as such), while others have already brought support for the RTX platform to commercial implementation - these are Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and the Octane renderer. Among the dozen applications we chose for laptop tests, these programs make up a little less than a third. Agree, a more interesting proportion compared to the 3DNews gaming methodology in the reviews of discrete video cards.
ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo (UX581GV)
Before we proceed to the benchmark results and announce the full list of test participants, we should pay tribute to the first RTX Studio branded device that fell into our hands - perhaps without a badge on the case, because there simply is no suitable place for it. Readers who found in the laptop a resemblance to a recent guest of the test lab - , are absolutely right. We have the same model before us, but the list of components has changed a bit: this time, instead of the top modification, which includes the Intel Core i9-9980HK central processor (eight cores, Hyper Threading and Turbo frequency up to 5 GHz), we got the version with Intel Core i7 -9750H (six cores, Hyper Threading and Turbo frequency up to 4,5 GHz), and RAM is not 32, but 16 GB.
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Otherwise, the configuration of the machine has not undergone the slightest change since the time of acquaintance. The ROM is a high-performance 1 TB Samsung MZVLB0T1HALR drive, which ASUS likes to install in its laptops - this is a complete analogue of the one we studied for a long time , for OEM supply only, not retail. Communication with the outside world is supported by the Intel AX200 chip of the IEEE 802.11b / g / n / ac / ax standard, operating at frequencies of 2,4 and 5 GHz (with a bandwidth of 160 MHz) and theoretical speed up to 2,4 Gb / s. It also serves the Bluetooth 5 channel. But ASUS refused a wired network, although if necessary, you can connect at least an external ethernet adapter without additional power to the ZenBook Pro Duo, even a box with a 10-gigabit NIC via the Thunderbolt 3 interface.
All variants of the UX581GV are equipped with a GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 6 GB of RAM. Moreover, according to the laptop specifications, this version of NVIDIA discrete graphics does not belong to the Max-Q category, and therefore should work under load at sufficiently high clock frequencies compared to similar chips in more compact machines, strangled by cooling and battery life requirements.
| ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo UX581GV | |
|---|---|
| Display | 15,6", 3840×2160, OLED+14", 2840×1100, IPS |
| CPU | Intel Core i9-9980HK Intel Core i7-9750H |
| Video card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (6 GB GDDR6) |
| RAM | Up to 32GB DDR4-2666 |
| Installing Drives | 1 × M.2 (PCI Express x4 3.0), 256 GB - 1 TB |
| Optical drive | No |
| Interfaces | 1 × Thunderbolt 3 (USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C) 2 x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A 1 × 3,5 mm mini-jack 1 x HDMI |
| Built-in battery | No data |
| External power supply | 230 W |
| dimensions | 359 × 246 × 24 mm |
| Notebook weight | 2,5 kg |
| Operating system | Windows 10 x64 |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Price in Russia | 237 rubles for a test model with Core i590, 7 GB RAM and 16 TB SSD |
But the main pride of the ASUS laptop is, of course, the display, or rather, two at once. The computer's main screen is a luxurious 15,6-inch OLED touch panel with a resolution of 3840 × 2160 pixels. As it should be for panels based on organic light-emitting diodes, it differs even from the reference liquid crystal counterparts in “infinite” contrast and viewing angles. In addition, in a separate review of the ZenBook Pro Duo, we found that the display is quite well calibrated by the standards of mainstream devices and has an extremely wide color gamut. The area opposite the main screen, having shifted the keyboard down, is occupied by an additional one, also touch-sensitive, with a resolution of 3840 × 1100. For this role, the manufacturer chose an IPS panel, and even against the background of the neighboring OLED, the image on it looks great and obviously not without calibration.
It's a good sign that the first member of the RTX Studio family we'll be testing in production applications is as good a product as the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo. And yet, let's not lose sight of the fact that we have an extremely expensive computer: an experimental configuration with an Intel Core i9-9750H processor and 16 GB of RAM cannot be found in Russia for less than 237 rubles. - by the will of the market, it is now even more expensive than the top version, which we tested last month. In addition, there are two nuances that are not so important for games, but require attention in the context of professional applications. First, the GeForce RTX 590 graphics adapter itself has a solid headroom even when adjusted for lower frequencies compared to a desktop graphics card, but its 2060 GB of RAM can be an obstacle in tasks that are demanding on this parameter - especially in 6D - rendering complex scenes.
And secondly, while the ZenBook Pro Duo's main screen passed the flag-waving color reproduction tests, OLED has known flaws. In order to keep the power consumption of the matrix within the required limits, the logic controlling it limits the total light output of all elements, so a single pixel on a screen filled with white will not be as bright as a white dot on a black background. In the context of responsible work with color correction, this is also problematic. In addition, no OLED screen is immune to burn-in, and as a result, it can forever preserve the imprint of the OS interface for posterity. Finally, it is easy to see that in the design of the ZenBook Pro Duo, the main controls are clearly left in the background. The keyboard, shifted closer to the edge, is perhaps a plus when the user is working at the table, but the size of some keys, and, first of all, the location and modest area of the touchpad will need to be adjusted.
For a closer look at the ZenBook Pro Duo UX581GV and the results of its testing in games and everyday tasks, we advise readers to return to the full this experimental and in many ways extremely curious brainchild of ASUS. And now it's time for the main course - comparing several laptops (including, of course, this one) in professional applications for processing digital content.
Testing technique
To evaluate the performance of ZenBook Pro Duo and other devices against which the RTX Studio laptop will perform in benchmarks, we have compiled a selection of ten working applications. Some of them, in one form or another, have already served 3DNews more than once in reviews of CPUs, graphics cards, and finished computers. Others, on the contrary, we have not yet touched until we started working on the article that you are reading at the moment. All programs of the test methodology are designed to create one or another type of visual content, cover a fairly wide range of tasks and a wide range of computational load. Two of them are used by photographers and graphic designers - Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. The second block of applications is software for converting and editing video - Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and REDCINE-X Pro. The last and most significant part of the tests belongs to 3D ray tracing rendering tools - Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya and the OctaneRender renderer.
| Program | Test | Operating system | Setting | API | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel/macOS | NVIDIA/Windows | ||||
| Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 | Puget Systems Adobe Photoshop CC Benchmark | Windows 10 Pro x64 / macOS 10.14.6 | Basic Benchmark | OpenCL | CUDA |
| Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC 2019 | Enhance Details function | — | OpenCL | CUDA | |
| Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019 | Puget Systems Adobe Premiere Pro CC Benchmark | Standard Benchmark | OpenCL | CUDA | |
| Blender 2.8 | Demo Classroom | Renderer Cycles | CPU | CUDA | |
| MAXON Cinema 4D Studio R20 | Bamboo demo from the Cinema 4D Studio R20 distribution | Radeon ProRender renderer | CPU | OpenCL | |
| Coffee Beans demo from the Cinema 4D Studio R20 distribution | |||||
| Blackmagic Design Da Vinci Resolve Studio 16 | Color correction effects (4K Blackmagic RAW source) | H.264 Master Export Profile (4K@23,976 FPS) | Metal | CUDA | |
| Speed Warp (H.264 1080p source) | |||||
| Autodesk Maya 2019 | Sol Demo by NVIDIA | Renderer Arnold | CPU | CUDA | |
| OTOY RTX Octanebench 2019 | — | Windows 10 Pro x64 | — | — | CUDA |
| REDCINE-X PRO | 3K, 4K and 6K RED R8D decoding | — | CPU | CUDA | |
Unlike games that dominate 3DNews' mobile computer reviews, professional software lacks built-in performance measurement tools. For this reason, the test procedure in most of the programs we have chosen is built around a resource-intensive (mainly GPU-related) project created specifically for this purpose. Only the Octane renderer has its own benchmark. And finally, to test Adobe products - Photoshop and Premiere Pro - we used complex scripts , which make it possible to evaluate the performance of iron at several stages of content processing. In the comments to each benchmark, we will tell you in more detail about its design and how the results should be interpreted.
Since ASUS and Apple laptops took part in the comparison of devices, most of the tests were performed in their native environment - Windows 10 Pro x64 or macOS 10.14.6. Only REDCINE-X PRO, due to the peculiarities of the test scripts, had to be run under Windows even on Macs, and the required version of Octanebench for Mac simply does not exist. Computers with NVIDIA GPUs were tested using Studio driver version 431.86, which was current at the time of writing the review.
Test participants
When choosing systems to compare in production applications, we settled on four laptops that belong to a wide range of performance in terms of a set of main characteristics - the parameters of the central processor (from two to six cores with SMT) and GPU (integrated graphics, entry-level discrete gaming chip GeForce GTX 1050 or a fairly powerful RTX 2060) and RAM (8-16 GB). At the same time, we did not take into account configurations limited by the speed of ROM (all laptops are equipped with SSDs for the PCI Express bus), ultra-compact machines like the discontinued 12-inch MacBooks, and, on the other hand, multi-kilogram workstations, power components interlocking with desktop PCs.
| Устройство | CPU | RAM | Integrated GPU | Discrete GPU | Main drive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7-9750H (6/12 cores/threads, 2,6-4,5 GHz) | DDR4 SDRAM, 2666 MHz, 16 GB | Intel UHD Graphics 630 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 | Samsung MZVLB1T0HALR (PCIe 3.0 x4) 1024 GB | |
| ASUS TUF Gaming FX705G | Intel Core i5-8300H (4/8 cores/threads, 2,3-4,0 GHz) | DDR4 SDRAM, 2666 MHz, 8 GB | Intel UHD Graphics 630 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (4 GB) | Kingston RBUSNS8154P3128GJ (PCIe 3.0 x2) 128 GB |
| Apple MacBook Pro 13.3″ Mid 2019 (A2159) | Intel Core i5-8257U (4/8 cores/threads, 1,4-3,9 GHz) | LPDDR3 SDRAM, 2133 MHz, 16 GB | Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645 | — | Apple AP1024N (PCIe 3.0 x4) 1024 GB |
| Apple MacBook Air 13.3″ Mid 2019 (A1932) | Intel Core i5-8210Y (2/4 cores/threads, 1,6-3,6 GHz) | LPDDR3 SDRAM, 2133 MHz, 16 GB | Intel UHD Graphics 617 | — | Apple AP1024N (PCIe 3.0 x4) 1024 GB |
Source: 3dnews.ru