Here I go again. Since my last post on the subject I have not been able to fix the faulty battery on my Dell laptop so I half-decided to get another one.
Priority goes to make darktable and davinci resolve be as fast and responsive as possible. And yes, laptop and not desktop.
Keep in mind that I’m looking for a computer where it is noticeable the speed/responsiveness increase from my current laptop (Dell XP 9560 from 2017-18 I think, with core i7-7700HQ 2.8Ghz and Geforce GTX1050, 16 Gb ram etc).
I have looked (again!) at gaming laptops such as those from Asus, Dell etc but decided to get one from Tuxedo: German-based manufacturer, Linux-only, lots of configurations possible etc.
So the problem lies again in the too many configurations available and even after reading all the posts here on amd ryzen cpus and amd vs nvidia gpus, I’m very uncertain on what to get. Anyway these are the main options I have now (to make things comparable the prices below are all referred to a configuration with 16Gb of ram and a 500 GB ssd):
Aura 15, looks similar to the above, i.e. very light but less powerful cpu (AMD Ryzen 7 4700U + Radeon RX Vega 7), same price and weight (1.65Kg, EUR 1025)
Book XP15, Intel i7-10750H, + Geforce RTX2060: 2kg, EUR 1604
A few questions: is the integrated Radeon RX Vega of the two lightest machines good enough for Darktable (and are they supported in Ubuntu or do I need to hack around)? Are these AMD Ryzen 7 combined with Geforce GPUs as fast as intel i7 (the Book XP15 for example costs a lot more than the other laptops and from what I understand is mainly due to the intel cpu?..)?
But only Pulse 15 has the " high color gamut of 100% sRGB coverage and with its IPS-typical wide viewing angles ." Calling 100% sRGB high color gamut is a bit of exaggeration here and I would first look at the display then the rest.
Alright, thanks for that – I didn’t pay too much attention to the display in fact, maybe because when using darktable I almost always have my laptop plugged in to a good 27" monitor. But you’re right, better have a good screen for those times when I’m away from home.
The specific issue I have with the Pulse is that is lacking an external GPU, therefore my question about how good is the internal GPU from AMD, this Vega 7? (As a comparison I’ve learnt that all intel on-chip GPUs are not very good for darktable…)
Here are the results of some testing I did on friend’s machines. I gave them all the same raw file and xmp. They only had to import it and then export the jpg.
LG Gram with i5 1035G7 and Intel UHD - 34sec . Does not use opencl.
@KristijanZic good to know about Vega 7 not good for Resolve. Deleted that Pulse 15 model from my list!
And thanks also @zhopudey for those numbers, Ryzen 4800+rtx2060 on par with an old desktop, I think I need to lower my expectations about laptop performances then…
Yes, the results were interesting. My own antique desktop with an i5 3rd Gen and gtx1050 ti took 18secs. My understanding is that the gpu is making the most diff, and that the laptop GPUs are nowhere close to the same numbered desktop parts.
@aadm even if I can’t help with the laptop (I am pretty much a ThinkPad fanboy) I’d like to know a few things about DaVinci Resolve as I have trouble with OpenShot. I know how to handle basic tasks in OpenShot (import, cut, export etc) but I would look into another solution for my short GoPro clips and films because OS sometimes performs weird (to put it nicely) - two days ago I could not cut clips anymore, and the program freezes regularly.
@beachbum Hi Stefan, I guess we’ve had common experience, something “weird” would happen when doing simple cuts & edits of my family videos (for me a mixture of smartphone videos, gopros and the occasional dslr clip) using kdenlive or shotcut. I tried Davinci Resolve and well, apart from the sheer bulk of it (I mean you can do everything with this thing), it’s actually quite easy to learn how to do simple editing, adding titles and do basic color grading (there’s people here that have recommended Resolve also for color grading of photos!). So yeah, I’d recommend it.
To answer your questions:
no ppa but you have to download the zip file that they offer for free (in exchange for your name, email etc); then you convert the zip file to a .deb package you can install with sudo apt install [output.deb]. You do the conversion with a script by Daniel Tuffvesson, makeresolvedeb. Be prepared to have a couple of Gb available on your disks.
everything is super stable and just works. My current laptop is like yours, i7 + nvidia gpu (details in the original post above). Once again I stress that I mainly use the “cut” and “edit” modules with occasional usage of the excellent clip stabilizer and some simple curves to add contrast and saturation (both functionalities available in the “color” module). I have been using v16 for some time and just a couple of days ago installed the new 17 beta (I can’t tell the differences between the two honestly).
you need to know that however our source h264 clips from gopro and other consumer devices need to be transcoded to prores or DNxHD / DNxHR formats to be accepted by Resolve. I think this is only a peculiarity of the linux version. I have made a bash script to convert automatically all clips in a folder to resolve format. I will put it on github now and post the link later.
Hi again! I know this is a boring discussion but I’ll try ask for a tiny bit of extra help… I’m getting a bit lost…
After a few emails with Tuxedo customer care (good job on this! the first few days nobody would answer, then they got back to me multiple times and very quickly) I decided on their Book XP15 model, which is failry light (~2kg) + lots of configuration options.
I am struggling to understand which of these 3 options are the best considering the above mentioned use case (darktable+davinci resolve):
I have seen that on benchmarks the performance icnrease from 10750h to 10875h is fairly minimal and probably not something I’d notice?
While the jump from RTX2060 to RTX2080 should be pretty big but again, is it something that could only be noticed in gaming (which I’m not interested) or would I see it in Darktable and Resolve, i.e. in activities hwere the GPU is used only to speed up calculations?
Actually it is not minimal, it is 6 cores vs 8 cores with slightly higher frequency, so like 35% speed-up for multithreaded tasks, which is the case for both Darktable and Resolve.
I would personally choose faster CPU, and wouldn’t care much about GPU between those you mentioned, because at least in Darktable it is not utilized for 100% tasks, so difference would be pretty small. Don’t know about Resolve (how much of GPU it utilizes).
I know, maybe I should have looked deeper but for a non-expert like me I see in the first line +1% increase from one cpu to the other and this is for me “minimal”…
Other comparison:
where the performances are 80 to 84 in single core performance and 29 to 36 (i7-10750H 6-core vs i7-10874H 8-core)…
I’m glad to be helpful
Another point is that website userbenchmark.com is known to be not the best/honest place for benchmark stats. I’ve seen multiple times when people suggested to avoid it.
well yes I wanted to get an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H but couldnt find a good combination on the Tuxedo models I was checking (the Polaris 15 I mentioned at the beginning of the thread; much cheaper than the Book XP15 but little things here and there don’t add up to the laptop I want/need). So I realize that I’m paying a premium just because… Intel ! but the Book XP model doesn’t ship with AMD cpus etc.
It would have been different if I was just building a desktop computer but with laptops is difficult to have one with exactly the features you want. The other options from larger manufacturers were limited to a couple of models from Lenovo where I could specifiy all the ocmponents I wanted (thinkpad X1 extreme and T15g) but they are (1) much more expensive, (2) have to wait 5-6 weeks for building & shipping.
You may find this thread I started a little while ago interesting - I’m quite happy with the Corsair machine I settled on, although I couldn’t say it’s perfect, it’s pretty good, and fast, at least by my standards.
Only running windows though, so far.
Hi, I have Lenovo Thinkpad E14 Gen2 with AMD Ryzen 7 4700U + 16Gb 3200 + Win11 and I have no problem with darktable+OpenCL and even Davinci Resolve. But there is no huge advantage to use darktable with OpenCL since CPU is more powerful than integrated GPU. Haven’t tested any Linux distribution.
