If you’re a digital creator of any kind, chances are that most of the design and content production you do is via the suite of tools available on an Apple Macbook.
The automatic presumption is that Apple knows how to provide for creatives better than any other company, because the products were designed with creatives in mind. The company has long since been a haven for designers, visual effects artists, animators and more ” all of whom require a significantly higher level of rendering power than your average PC.
But Apple’s domination throughout the industry is not infinite nor is it without its pitfalls. A new host of laptops are here to demonstrate the capacity for creativity without opening up the crisp white/silver of a Macbook.
This article has been sponsored by NVIDIA, showing you another way.
NVIDIA’s Studio platform is now enabling other laptops and PCs to rival the Macbook Pro in terms of creative power and handling, with Quadro RTX 3000, 4000 and 5000 GPUs, as well as GeForce RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060 GPUs.
Announced at Computex in May, the RTX Studio line is focused on upping the creative power of laptops from ACER, HP and more to rival the in-built graphics of a Macbook Pro.
And it’s working, with the purported power to make Adobe Lightroom and Premiere work at up to seven times the speed of a Macbook Pro, according to NVIDIA.
There are a number of new RTX Studio laptops that are set to be equipped with NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs, thereby giving them greater efficacy in fulfilling the needs of creatives.
Razer Blade Studio Edition
With an aim to reduce the number of ‘spinning wheels of death’ encountered as you work, the Studio Edition laptops from Razer come equipped with up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 graphics cards. It also comes with a 4K display with a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut for accuracy.
It supports up to 8K video, and the upped graphic power means it can run programs like Adobe Premiere Pro (and the whole host of the Adobe Suite) with ease. In terms of processors, the Blade 15 Studio Edition will come with up to a Core i7-9750H CPU. If you opt for the Blade Pro 17, it goes up to a Core i9-9880H CPU.
Omen X 2S – GeForce RTX Studio Edition
Updated branding helps identify it as a relative to their gaming laptop, and the 1080p, 6-inch secondary touchscreen allows you to access multiple programs within the single laptop – which can be incredibly useful for creators. If you were to use it as a gaming laptop (as game artists, illustrators and content creators often do), you’d be well equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics.
The laptop itself is made with a micro-edge bezel, enabling a bigger display to work on everything from video to photography to design. It also contains up to a 9th-gen Intel Core i9 processor.
Acer ConceptD 9
Releasing in the US this season, the Acer ConceptD 9 functions as both a laptop and digital drafting table depending on the needs of the user. This, combined with its Pantone-validated 4K display, allows creators to use it with increased precision.
It also contains up to a 9th-gen Intel Core i9 processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics. Using a Wacom stylus, artists have the capacity to create using their preferred suite at a much faster speed with greater rendering power than most devices.
With that in mind, it’s difficult to see the Macbook Pro remain leader in the market when it doesn’t render anywhere near as quickly as the NVIDIA GPUs are capable of.
The bottom line is that creatives now have a choice. Where once it was a logical choice to opt for Apple, the market has expanded. Now, the capacity to create quickly and effectively from an alternative laptop or PC opens up a world of new possibilities.