Laptop - Graphics and Video editing

[Mel030812]

Hi! For work ill be doing graphics / video editing (vids will likely be in 4k) and will be using Creative Cloud, ie premiere pro, after effects.

The company got a Lenovo 11th Gen Intel(R) Core, Intel UHD graphics, NVIDIA T600 GPU, CPU 2304MHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.

I'm a bit concerned this isn't going to be able to run smoothly, but I could be completely wrong. Could anyone offer some advice on this?

[D Fosse]

I can tell you right away that for Photoshop, dual graphics is going to be a problem. You'll probably need to completely disable the Intel UHD. Photoshop uses the GPU for actual data processing, and the result returned to Photoshop for further processing. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other. It's not a simple downstream flow like in other simpler applications.

The T600 (apparently the next generation of the "budget Quadro" P620) should work well for now. Not high-end, but it shouldn't give you any problems.

You will also need a bigger system drive for the Photoshop scratch disk. Photoshop handles huge amounts of data, much more than any RAM you may have installed. The scratch file contains all history states for all open documents plus overhead, orders of magnitude bigger than your nominal starting file sizes. 1 TB should be considered minimum - and that does not include space for your documents and assets.

[Mel030812]

Thank you, how would disable this?

are there any laptops you would recommend instead?

[D Fosse]

See section 6 and 7 here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html 

Personally I wouldn't really recommend a laptop at all. Partly because dual GPUs is almost ubiquitous these days, and partly because they are usually stuffed with vendor modifications that mainly get in the way of Photoshop.

That's not to say you will always get problems, of course you won't. But chances are considerably higher than with a sensible desktop machine. A quick tour around the forum will confirm that.

The safest option of all is to build your own machine - simply because a clean installation of hardware and operating system, without any extra "helpful features", will give you a very reliable machine that never gives you any trouble.

That's my opinion and I stand by it 😉

[Peru Bob]

 video editing (vids will likely be in 4k)

I'm a bit concerned this isn't going to be able to run smoothly

By @Mel030812

You are right.  4K might be a problem, even using proxies:

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html

Also, you will need much more hard drive space for the cache files.

Have a look here:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/adobe-after-effects/hardware-recom...

and here:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/adobe-premiere-pro/hardware-recomm...

[RjL190365]

What D fosse stated re recommendation against a laptop refers to the way most laptops with both an integrated IGP enabled and a discrete GPU are set up to display. You see, most such laptops automatically switch between GPUs for the main display depending on the end use case. And that can - and does - cause problems with content creation apps in the first place. These laptops fail to recognize that content creation apps use the GPU relatively heavily (in other words, not content-app-aware).

Desktops with both GPUs enabled will not have this problem (unless you have monitors connected to both the GPU and the IGP) because typically only one GPU is used to display.

[Warren Heaton]

Any Apple laptop with at least 16GB of RAM with as much Flash storage as your budget allows for is a good choice.  As far as M1, M2, M1 Pro, M2 Pro, M1 Max, or M2 Max goes, it's not a question of if it will do it but a question of how quickly it will do it.