Creators, start your engines. Nvidia’s kicking off Siggraph, an annual professional graphics conference, with a pair of announcements designed to make life easier for industry diehards and amateur video producers alike. The company revealed 10 new RTX Studio laptops from a variety of partners, and new Studio drivers that bring capabilities formerly locked to Quadro GPUs alone over to the more mainstream GeForce and Titan lineups.
Nvidia introduced RTX Studio laptops at Computex in May. These laptops run powerful Max-Q hardware to make intense video- and image-editing as painless and portable as possible, backed by drivers devoted to optimizing creative software rather than games.
These are the minimum requirements for Nvidia RTX Studio laptops:
- GPU: RTX 2060, Quadro RTX 3000 or higher
- CPU: Intel Core i7 (H-series) or higher
- RAM: 16GB or higher
- SSD: 512GB or higher
- Display: 1080p or 4K
The initiative launched with 17 laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Razer. At Siggraph on Monday, ten new models were announced. Here are the details, verbatim from Nvidia:
- “Lenovo Legion Y740 Laptop Studio Edition features up to GeForce RTX 2080 GPUs within 17- and 15-inch laptops, available later this fall.
- Lenovo ThinkPad P53 and P73 mobile workstations support up to Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs within 17- and 15-inch systems. The ThinkPad P53 is available now; the ThinkPad P73 will be available starting August.
- Dell Precision 7540 and Dell Precision 7740 mobile workstations, available today, are configurable with up to Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs.
- HP ZBook 15 and 17 mobile workstations feature Quadro RTX GPUs, with the 17-inch model configurable with up to a Quadro RTX 5000.
- BOXX GoBOXX SLM mobile workstations are available with a Quadro RTX 3000 GPU in the 15-inch system and either Quadro RTX 4000 or 3000 in the 17-inch system.”
Nvidia’s releasing freshly updated Studio drivers to coincide with the announcement, and it unlocks a new feature for prosumers. The new Studio driver finally brings 30-bit (10bpc) color support in OpenGL applications to GeForce and Titan GPUs.
Nvidia“With 24-bit color, a pixel can be built from 16.7 million shades of color. By increasing to 30-bit color, a pixel can now be built from over 1 billion shades of color, which eliminates the abrupt changes in shades of the same color,” Nvidia’s announcement post explains. The feature helps “seamless color transitions without banding.”
It’s a surprising (but welcome) development; while AMD Radeon graphics cards have supported the feature for years, Nvidia has long restricted 30-bit color support in OpenGL to the professional Quadro lineup for product segmentation reasons. Now, those RTX Studio laptops equipped with RTX 20-series GPUs can get in on editing HDR images, too.
Today’s Studio driver update also includes optimizations for several recent creative application updates: Magix VEGAS Pro v17, Autodesk Arnold, Allegorithmic Substance Painter 2019.2, Blender 2.80, Cinema 4D R21, and Otoy Octane Render 2019.2