NVIDIA Studio Certified Laptops Bring RTX And Specialized Driver Suite To Creators
NVIDIA on Monday announced a new platform and certification program aimed at making it easy for creators to identify which laptops will suit their needs. It's called NVIDIA Studio, and laptops that bear the badge combine GeForce RTX GPUs with NVIDIA's Studio Stack of specialized SDKs and dedicated drivers to run the top creative applications.
In part, this is also a play to extol the benefits of GPU rendering versus trying to accomplish creative tasks on CPU horsepower alone.
NVIDIA never misses an opportunity to promote GPUs over CPUs, and this is another opportunity to do that. AMD and Intel might have something to say about that, of course, but from NVIDIA's vantage point, the CPU is no match for the GPU with tensor cores. In Adobe Lightroom, for example, NVIDIA claims that a higher-end Studio-certified laptop will run circles around a typical Core i7 machine or a MacBook Pro with Vega 20 graphics. In fact, Adobe Lightroom now makes use of GeForce RTX tensor cores and AI to enhance image fidelity on the fly and with the processing workload in general.
"NVIDIA Studio pairs RTX GPUs, which enable real-time ray tracing, AI processing and high-resolution video editing, with studio-grade software to surpass the growing demands of today’s creators," said Jason Paul, general manager of GeForce software and technology at NVIDIA. "The new RTX Studio laptops are the perfect tool for creatives who need desktop-class performance while on the go."
Qualifying laptops can feature any current RTX GPU, including the new Quadro RTX 5000, 4000, and 3000 GPUs, as well as GeForce RTX 2080, 2070, and 2060 GPUs. According to NVIDIA, certified laptops can accelerate content creation from video editing to 3D rendering, with performance that is up to 7 times faster than a MacBook Pro. Depending on the specific GPU, these machines feature anywhere from 6GB (GeForce RTX 2060) to a whopping 16GB (Quadro RTX 5000) of video memory.
NVIDIA also says that its Studio drivers undergo extensive testing against multi-app creator workflows and multiple revisions of the top creative applications. The pitch seems to be that Studio-certified laptops are not only capable of high-powered content creation chores, but also offer a mix of drivers and SDKs that ensure a smooth workflow without any hiccups. It's sort of the GPU equivalent to Intel's vPro platform.
To kick things off, 17 RTX Studio laptops from seven PC makers were announced at Computex. Razer is among them with its new Blade Studio Edition line. The Blade 15 Studio Edition features a 4K OLED display, Intel Core i7-9750H processor, and a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU. Meanwhile, the larger Blade 17 Studio Edition gets a 4K display as well, but with a 120Hz refresh rate, a more powerful Core i9-9880H processor, and the same Quadro RTX 5000 GPU.
Some of these systems will ship with Max-Q GPUs, which enable thinner and lighter profiles, and potentially longer battery life.
RTX Studio laptops will be available in June from the likes of Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI, and Razer, Pricing will start at $1,599.
