This week at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA showcased 10 new laptops that would be carrying the new NVIDIA RTX graphics chips with features that include ray tracing and machine learning. The new laptops feature either the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or higher GPUs onboard, or Quadro RTX 3000 or higher, and NVIDIA is working closely to be sure that the RTX Studio laptops run at peak performance. And with the NVIDIA Studio Driver, the laptops are certified for high-performance video editing, including real-time full 8K workflows.
For example, the MSI P75 Creator 9SF sports these specs:
- 2.3 GHz 8 core i9 processor
- 32 GB of DDR4 RAM
- 1TB SSD
- GeForce RTX 2070 with 8GB of maxQ Cache
- True Color 2 Color Technology for 100% sRGB color accuracy
Image Credit - Max Yurev, YouTubeCredit:
The result is a 45% performance boost over the previous models, and the great irony is, this laptop costs $2699, about $1100 less than the 2019 MacBook Pro. That model, while boasting similar specs, cannot handle the 8K workload since it isn't NVIDIA supported. And that's not lost of the Mac faithful, who have been screaming for a while that Mac returns to NVIDIA graphics. Additionally, MSI also manages the heat load better, not having to deal with thermal throttling. The MSI also is three times faster in OpenCL benchmarking.
There's also a 17" 4K display with a resolution of 3840x2160, and the MSI P75 comes with three M.2 SSD storage slots, so you can put plenty of storage on your laptop to handle the full video clips without having to resort to proxies. And you don't have to get an extra dongle like with the MacBook Pro that only sports a single USB-C port.
Check out more on how the MSI performs by watching this breakdown by Max Yuryev:
But the real advantage comes from NVIDIA's partnership with RED, which gives the RTX Studio laptops the ability to run RED's REDCODE RAW in 8K at 25 fps, live, all while rendering the footage ahead of it. And you can even do a full grade. No proxies, no waiting for transcoding. It's all in real-time. On top of that, exporting your footage in full 8K, the RTX Studio can push out your footage in nearly a minute of footage in a minute of export time. And you can bet it'll scream with ProRes RAW as well.
Of course, the reality is, that most of us won't need to cut in 8K for the foreseeable future, and even when you do, you're likely going to use proxies for cutting in Adobe until they can support it. RED recently published the API for using REDCODE RAW with NVIDIA RTX Studio, so any company can begin incorporating that support into their workflow. It's really only a matter of time.
There are certainly other options out there. As stated above, NVIDIA was showcasing 10 new laptop models in their booths at SIGGRAPH, bringing the total number of RTX capable laptops to 27. At the very least, they'll all perform great in 4K and above, but I think only the upper-end models, like the MSI P75 will shoulder the 8K load.
