VIEW FROM THE LABS
If you’re suspicious of buying a “gaming” laptop for serious tasks, Stuart Andrews has some words of comfort
Before we start a Labs group test, we contact all the relevant manufacturers detailing the kind of machines we’re looking for. In this case, I explained to them, we were on the hunt for serious creative laptops, so please could the various manufacturers either provide the kind of high-end, high-cost mobile workstations that they sell into the professional 3D graphics market or machines that focused on photography and digital design?
Yet something unexpected happened: a number of manufacturers asked if they could send in laptops that I’d normally think of as high-end games machines. There were various reasons behind this, but one message kept on coming through: these laptops had the specs, the features and the performance required for the most demanding creative applications.
Why not try them and see how well they did?
Now, I’d always argue that there are good reasons to pay extra for a professional-grade device. After all, if you’re going to roll out a new fleet of corporate laptops, we wouldn’t recommend you cut costs by buying budget, consumer-grade devices. In business, security, reliability and long-term support all count.
The same applies with workstation-class PCs. For applications such as CAD and professional 3D design, it makes sense to work with hardware certified by the application vendors, if only because the costs of software licensing are the real long-term expense, and you need to know that your applications will work reliably and effectively when you need them. Especially if that’s what your business relies on.
Yet there’s a lot to be said for putting games machines to some good old-fashioned hard labour. Their manufacturers have grown canny enough to soften some of the more aggressive design elements and improve their core usability, and gamers are increasingly looking for screens that can do justice to the high-quality art and photorealistic assets being used in modern video games. The explosion of streaming has created a demand for systems that can both play games and do real creative work.
Most of all, it’s games, videoediting and 3D applications that keep pushing the limits of PC performance, and the hardware that will run next-generation titles at Ultra HD resolutions at 60fps (or 1080p at 144fps) will also storm through 3D rendering and video-processing workloads. In fact, the growth of GPU-compute technologies, such as Nvidia’s CUDA, aligned with GPU acceleration for some professional 3D rendering engines, pretty much ensures that gaming-grade graphics hardware will do the work. And because these laptops are commodity products rather than specialist, niche PCs, the pricing is often more attractive too.
I’m not telling you to embrace your inner gamer, or that a gaming laptop is the answer to every creative need – I just think it’s worth keeping an open mind. Beneath that RGB lighting and jet-fighter design could lie a mobile graphics or video workstation that does everything you need in style.
“Most of all, it’s games, video-editing and 3D applications that keep pushing the limits of PC performance”