In the first article from the notebook review series I am recommending two NVidia cards: the GTX 970M and GTX 980M. They are the top two performers from NVidia at this moment, and they are most likely to successfully keep up the pace a few years from now.
When doing my research, I tried to find some benchmarks to show Blender’s rendering performance. I wasn’t able to find any data, so I turned to the online community for help. I knew that in the notebook community there are users with vast knowledge on the subject, and with access to the newest hardware. I found the reviews made by HTWingNut from the notebookreview forum very thorough and informative over the time, so I approached him with my request.
GeForce GTX 970M and 980M rendering performance in Blender Cycles. Figures courtesy of HTWingNut.
His reaction was awesome: he agreed to help, and he took the time to run eMirage’s Pabellon Barcelona benchmark scene on two of the notebooks that he had for review. They were equipped with the 970M and 980M cards (the 3GB and respectively 4GB versions). The tests were done with Blender 2.72b. HTWingNut has also posted a full review of the Sager NP8652 / Clevo P650SG notebook, which contains the Blender benchmark figures as well.
And if you ever wondered how Blender scales on a 4k screen, this is how it looks:
Testing Blender speed on a 4K laptop screen, powered by GeForce 980m. Courtesy of HTWingNut
All figures and screenshots are courtesy of HTWingNut.
The conclusion is that the new generation of mobile GPUs from NVidia is blazingly fast and is significantly narrowing the gap between desktop and mobile GPUs. So what do you think about these numbers? How do they stack against the ones from your machines?
Stick around for the last part of the article, with my recommended notebook configurations for rendering.
Update: The second part of the article is now online and it contains some recommended notebooks for various scenarios and budgets.
