mobile video card advise

[memlafeder]

hi guys, I am a product designer, going to buy a notebook, and want to use it for rendering, if I need to while out on vacations etc.

budget is not that much, and I am not looking for a high end workstation. That new notebook will be also used by other departments which has no relations with R&D or design.

the only thing I could not be able to decide is, video card, some says I should not be buy anything less than nvidia gtx850m or similar, and some says even nvidia gt740m would let me to render a basic scene..

the thing is, no one is going to be speed freak on this laptop, anything would work that will let me to render a scene with keyshot camera model, in 20-30 mins with 2000x1600 res.

by the way new notebooks cpu will be intell i7 4500 ghz or something similar..

I would love to have opinions of keyshot users specially on notebooks.

tnx

[edwardo]

I use macbook Pros almost exclusively and they run keyshot great! My old one was just an intel duo, 3GHZ ish. It was slow but robust and fine for setting up scenes (even big ones). However, if I had to render at high res and crank up a few settings it meant leaving the machine rendering away overnight in most cases. I guess it kind of depends on what your rendering, what materials your using and how high you've got various settings pushed up to.

When using a laptop (or any slow computer) my suggestion is to work almost exclusively in performance mode, then use 'region render' to work on specific areas that you need to see clearly (rather than letting the whole shot 'res-up'). Then render, and just accept it will take a while. If your render has a difficult area that is taking longer to clear up than the rest of the scene, you can save time by using 'render region' again, and focus all your computer power in that one area, then comp them together in photoshop.

For the purposes you described, I think you will find a laptop (i7 4.5Ghz) fine. And in all honesty, working on a singe (small) screen, with nowhere else to put your toolbars and windows, will slow you down more that the computer spec.

As far as graphics cards go - I don't think keyshot cares what graphic card you'v got, so I would base that decision on what suits your modelling package best. In general, anything with 1G or more should handle most of your demands

hope this helps
Ed

[KeyShot]

Yes, the graphics card is of minor importance. More cpu cores is better. The internal Intel graphics is fine for KeyShot.