Is anyone running Octane on a Laptop?

[will2power]

I've been wondering about this because it's almost time for me to look at a replacement laptop. I would like to be able to run Octane on it because I do work on 3d stuff when I'm away from my big computer. I wanted to look for one with a robust video card and I came across this one that can be configured with a second video card. Is anyone using something like this on the go? I'm not really doing a lot of heavy animations. Most of what I do is still renders but with high detail, and I try to go for realistic lighting. I'm just wondering what other folks are doing in similar situations.

[prehabitat]

I'm not doing the level of work you're talking about, but i do use my laptop for octane occasionally if i have a scene I'm trying to get done. It's often just to sort out the geometry & test, not production.

Also; with your SLI laptop, its worth checking if you can you disable SLI?

My tip; I set a power option of 'CUDA rendering' which limits my cpu to 50% of its maximum frequency; because the cpu & gpu share a cooling system inmy laptop; and octane produces a lot of gpu heat. Voxelising is a bit slower, but its te viewport speed we care about right.

Just my 2c

[will2power]

I was looking at an Ideapad Yoga Y500 laptop because the ultrabay option allows you to add a second NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M 2GB graphics card in SLI. I have a second job at night and I have a lot of time to sit there and work on stuff but my current I5 processor is not really adequate. I'm not trying to do full on animations, but I'd like to be able to do things like setting up the lighting and developing the material settings and test renders while I'm at work, and doing more serious renders when I'm at home but I don't want to waste money buying it if it's not practical to work on a laptop with the software.

[prehabitat]

Have someone with a laptop with similar spec single card you can try octane on for a night?

I find the lack of screen real estate a real pain - and I'm using a plugin for Revit, not the standalone - although I could probably sync my materials through dropbox? (might have to try this) - I really stick to geometry within Revit - which I'm used to doing on the move.

I think your mileage may vary applies here:

worth noting, you could do a decent CUDA upgrade to your home computer with the money saved from NOT buying a laptop - but if you're truly sitting around idle for 8 hours, and can devote that time to production, the laptop sounds like its a no-brainer: if you're using Octane standalone, perhaps dual-boot it with a linux(octane only) & get the speed improvements from linux too: might turn out close to the power of your beast on the desk.

Regards,

Andrew

[face_off]

I mainly use a laptop now - an it's very good. I use the on-board graphics as the Win display adapter - and 740M for rendering (it's not super fast, but gets there in the end). It's an MSI i7 with 16Gig RAM, 1TB HD. Next time I would go for 32Gig of RAM. Biggest issue is the small screen size. The key is to get a laptop with onboard graphics.

Paul

[prehabitat]

I think my iGPU is set up with my 650m to auto-switch when required???
I Might have to check the settings: can you choose iGPU only & it not hardware-disable the discrete GPU?

(apologies for hijack) Also, Paul: have/can you used octane plugin for Revit & had materials sync with your desktop via dropbox or something similar?

at any rate: Will2power, I think you have your answer: laptop will work well.

[face_off]

I Might have to check the settings: can you choose iGPU only & it not hardware-disable the discrete GPU?

I don't think my laptop has iGPU - so I just rightclick the desktop, "screen resolution", "Detect", select "Intel" from the "Display" dropdown, "OK".

Paul: have/can you used octane plugin for Revit & had materials sync with your desktop via dropbox or something similar?

I've tried both Dropbox and Google Drive, and they work well. The only issue is that their path is "C:\Users\Paul\Google Drive\Revit Materials", so I can only access those material texturemaps from an account called "Paul", otherwise the link changes. Both Dropbox and Google need an option to have to storage folder outside the user account area. This might be possible - not sure. Or an option to share an absolute folder (like C:\ProgramData\Revit\OctaneRenderForRevitTexturemaps). There is also a bug in Google Drive where you need to restart it if you wake your PC from sleep in order for it to sync - very annoying.

Paul

[prehabitat]

I think I've used symbolic links to achieve this in the past - might be worth checking out?


Andrew

[face_off]

I just checked out symbolic linking as suggested, and in conjunction with Google Drive/Dropbox it offers an excellent syncing method for materials and texturemaps. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/co ... -or-linux/.

Paul

[xxdanbrowne]

Yeah. Alienware m17x r3 with a weaker than water nvidia 460.

After I get done my renos I'm going to buy a desktop and put a couple of high ram 700 series in.