Laptop specs question

Whenever you encounter any issues with Enscape or your subscription please reach out to our dedicated support team directly through the Help Center or by using the Feedback button as detailed here.
  • Hey all,


    I'm tech saavy but relatively new to Enscape so hoping somebody can help me with a specs related question. I have a beast of a desktop pc that runs sketchup, enscape and VR (Oculus Quest 2) very well but am looking to be able to go mobile. In general I'm looking at laptops with an i9, 32G of RAM and an nvidia GTX 3080 (16 vram). What i'm trying to solidify before buying is if a setup like this will do well with the same load of Sketchup, Enscape and VR. I understand that a laptop GPU is not on the same plane as a desktop one so just looking for first-hand, real-world input on if anybody has a similar setup and has had success? I'm sure cooling is one of the bigger factors with a laptop formfactor so let's assume I am using a quality cooling pad as well. I've considered laptops with AMD components but thus far i just haven't had the best of luck with them. My current MSI laptop (which I thought would do well) has a Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 64G of RAM and a Radeon RX 6700M (10G vram) and it does really poorly.


    Any advice you all could provide would be greatly appreciated.


    Cheers

  • Additional comment in that Nvidia just announced the release of the 4xxx series of GPUs set to ship out next month to where maybe that's a logical timeproof option as well. Supposedly the mobile 4090 is on par with with desktop 3090! I still retain my question though of preference between AMD and Intel/NVidia or the potential of mixing the two with an AMD CPU but an nvidia GPU.


    Thanks again

  • I’ve just got a new laptop with a 12th gen i9 and it works about as well as is possible for a laptop with SketchUp

    The new intel 12th gen processors are much better for single threaded workloads, which is what SketchUp devours. In basic SketchUp benchmarks it’s 25%+ more performant than my 10th gen I9

  • I own a small business where I have multiple laptops to compare. One of them for instance has an AMD ryzen 7 5800H CPU paired with a rtx3070. That laptop doesn't do much better than my all AMD MSI laptop. Having an i9 for instance is maybe enough for just sketchup and having a 30 series gpu surely helps with sketchup plus enscape but I can't come anywhere near being able to real-time render with high settings and process smoothly. The 3070 laptop version for instance has 8G vram which I wonder if it's the main culprit. Again, not only am I needing eketchup and enscape but also VR on top of it so it's just quite taxing.

    • Official Post

    Additional comment in that Nvidia just announced the release of the 4xxx series of GPUs set to ship out next month to where maybe that's a logical timeproof option as well. Supposedly the mobile 4090 is on par with with desktop 3090! I still retain my question though of preference between AMD and Intel/NVidia or the potential of mixing the two with an AMD CPU but an nvidia GPU.


    Thanks again

    I was a bit pleasantly surprised over the performance when it comes to their mobile 4xxx series lineup, albeit with quite a reduction in VRAM compared to their desktop counterpart. Something to perhaps keep in mind when working with larger scenes, high resolution textures, etc but you should still definitely be future proof and VR ready going with a mobile 4090 or even a 4080. A reduction in VRAM was also done before in the 3xxx lineup as well so it's not exclusive to the 4xxx lineup.


    Further, while we do not support DLSS 3 (yet) DLSS (2 in this case) is not something we reccomend having turned on during VR walkthroughs anyway as it makes the image rather blurry. Of course outside of VR DLSS is rather useful, albeit it's a question if you'd even really require it with a mobile 4090. ;)


    Still, just to make sure you're aware and as andybot mentioned it, the 3xxx lineup like a mobile 3090 also offers lots of performance still and is also VR ready. I'd say overall though if budget isn't too much of a concern and you just want the best what's currently out there for a great VR experience, go with one of the 4xxx laptops, now that we've seen actual benchmarks and such. That's just my opinion of course but I hope it helps!

  • ...but I can't come anywhere near being able to real-time render with high settings and process smoothly. The 3070 laptop version for instance has 8G vram which I wonder if it's the main culprit. Again, not only am I needing eketchup and enscape but also VR on top of it so it's just quite taxing.

    If you want the "best" for now I'd recommend this Lenovo Legion. It is pretty impressive as far as laptops go, but I doubt it would be leaps and bounds above what you have now. At a certain point you just have to manage your scenes and expectations. Enscape does a reasonable job of adapting scenes to fit within the available VRAM (to a point) so I wouldn't assume that 3080/16GB VRAM is going to make things go from "really poor" to buttery smooth.


    For CPU, I don't know that it makes much difference, Intel and AMD are leapfrogging each other with each release. For GPU I'd stick with Nvidia. Given the hardware you have now, to see a significant difference I'd wait a couple months for laptops w/ 13th gen intel + 4090 laptop GPU.