I’m looking for a laptop, that I can use to process photos with Darktable, while on travel. I’ve never been able to get opencl to work with my current laptop (AMD Ryzen 3 with Radeon graphics). Also, it’s painfully slow and crashes when using more computational intensive modules. I don’t need the laptop to be as fast as my desktop which has a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti…half fast would be a huge improvement. I use Fedora 43 on all my computers.
When on travel I use the laptop mainly to review and rate images. I usually don’t do much processing cause I don’t want to spend my vacation sitting in from of a screen. When inspired I will do a little more processing on select images.
From my market research it seems that to get a dedicated GPU you need to buy a gamer machine. In my limited experience with these machines I find that they are power hungry and deplete batteries fairly rapidly. I’m not sure that the benefits are sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages of a heavier machine, decreased battery life and higher expense.
Will current integrated GPUs perform at least half as fast as my old 980 Ti? Which ones do people here recommend for good opencl support with Linux? I assume I would need at least 16GB of memory.
Other requirements are USB C charge capability. Seems like all USB C charging is not created equal and some do not provide enough power to charge while the machine is in use. From what I’ve read this probably requires a Thunderbolt port to get decent charge capability.
So what do people here recommend? Are there laptops with integrated GPUs that provide acceptable performance with Darktable? Are there laptops with dedicated GPUs that have are not so power hungry as a gamer machine?
I defer to more computer savvy people but if I was buying a laptop for DT I would want a gaming computer because they share similar demands. On the other hand if I wanted a laptop for travel I would want a small light weight computer that I could backup images to while travelling but wait until I got home to do the serious editing.
I recently purchased an Acer aspire 14 for $450usd. It has a nice screen, 1tb SSD and intel iGPU. I intent to install fedora as soon as I have some free time. On Windows, dt runs pretty good and the screen colors look nice. Like you, I wanted a USBc charge port for ease of traveling. Gaming laptops are heavy, this one is light.
I’m trying to avoid gaming laptops as portability is more important to me than performance. I only need good enough performance not maximum performance.
I just did an export test of an nikon z5 image from play raw with simple export. CPU only was 2.6s and igpu opencl was 1.7s. This is on Windows with current master (5.5.0+105~gfb61be6604).
Just received a 16" ThinkPad with Intel Ultra 7 cpu and Intel Graphics. It’s as fast my older desktop with Nvidia GTX-980Ti gpu.
This ticks all the boxes I was after: at least half as fast as my desktop, slightly bigger display than my old laptop, lightweight (approx 3.5lb), Thunderbolt 4 for charging.
Maybe this is too old, but if you’re still looking for recommendations, here’s mine.
I used to have a gaming laptop for the obvious reasons then I got fed up with the weight, the bulk etc.
In June 2024 I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad P14s with a Gen 5 core ultra 5-124H, 32 Gb, 2Tb ssd, a 14.5" IPS HD screen and a “business” GPU, RTX A500 with 4Gb (around 1700 euros new).
It is still plenty fast and very portable compared to any gaming laptop, and I have no intention to change it anytime soon. Maybe you could look at a similar model on the used market, I don’t know how much the hardware has improved from 2024 onwards.
For reference, even a Kaby Lake laptop with Intel graphics many years ago had benefits in some workloads for darktable.
Intel graphics has come a LONG way since then, ESPECIALLY the newest Panther Lake chips.
Also, on the other side of things, many modern gaming laptops are not that heavy and not horribly expensive. The Asus TUF I have at home with an RTX 3070 with (if I recall, I’ll check tonight if I remember) 8GB VRAM which was a lot for the time was around $1500 when I bought it in 2021, and is lighter than the Intel-integrated-graphics Dell Precision 3591 I have with my current job. Battery life isn’t that bad in general thanks to the fact that like most modern gaming laptops, it can use integrated graphics and shut down the discrete when GPU workload is light.
Now the Dell Precision I had at my last job with NVidia discrete graphics… Ooooh that was a heavy chonker.
(Note: All of the above were 15" screens. Obviously you’ll save some weight with a smaller screen, and anything with a 17" screen is going to be a heavy chonker. Actually that previous work laptop MIGHT have been a 17 but I think it was a 15" screen.)
This. Even older lines like Raptor Lake (13th gen) have iGPUs that can be found in sub-700EUR laptops are nearing the FP32 1Tflop benchmark. iGPUs are becoming perfectly adequate for Darktable these days, allowing portability and speed.
I have 11th gen (Tiger lake) Iris Xe and it’s already half decent for darktable - certain modules are noticeably faster and now that I have 32 GB of RAM, tiling is never an issue, as the GPU should have up to 16 GB available, which is overkill for the performance, but useful for hi-res previews, my darktable no longer crashes from low memory