Best Laptops for Animation

Laptop buying guide for 3D Rendering and Animation

Animation is one of the most hardware-intensive tasks for an average laptop to handle. Therefore it is imperative to have a powerful enough laptop. There are a lot of things to consider before you buy a Laptop for Animation. This guide is tailored for 2D & 3D Animation softwares such as Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate, Pencil2D Animation, Synfig Studio, FlipBook, Procreate, Cartoon Animator 4, Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender, Modo, and 3ds Max.

The process of converting 2D and 3D models into images and animations is known as Rendering. Having a fast CPU will make your editing experience smooth however GPUs are dramatically faster when it comes to rendering and save you a lot of time. So, in order of priority, this is what you should be looking at on a laptop (Oversimplified Version)

What to look for in a Laptop for 3D Rendering and Animation

The way that most modern Animation software works are that they utilize the CPU for doing all of the calculations during the editing process and the GPU for previewing it on the screen. Such workloads are not as intensive on the graphics card as they are on the CPU.

• CPU: We recommend is at least a 6 core CPU such as the Ryzen 5 5600H/ i5 11400H for entry level workloads and 8 Core CPU such as i7 11800H/Ryzen 7 5800H or above for professional workloads.
• GPU: We recommend going for Nvidia over AMD with at least 6GB of VRAM. Try to go for the latest RTX 30 series graphics of AMD’s Rx 6000 series.
• RAM: RAM though has no real impact on performance as long as you have enough of it. Here is our recommendation on RAM.
  • 8GB of RAM: If you are a student.
  • 16GB of RAM: If you are professional
  • 32GB of RAM: If you want to work with very complex and high-res scenes.
• Storage: We would recommend SSD over HDD. But an HDD would still work and for most laptops, you can easily add more storage later.
• Display: Though it does not affect the performance of your device as much it will still affect not only your animation experience but also your day-to-day experience. Here are the things that you should look out for while looking at the display specs of a laptop.
  1. Resolution: Go for at least 1080p/FHD Display
  2. Display Size: Depends on your personal preference.
  3. Brightness: Go for at least 300 nits
  4. Color accuracy: 80 percent+ sRGB Rating (Recommended)
  5. Panel Type: OLED and IPS (Recommended)

Laptop CPU Recommendations For Animation

CPU is the most important piece of hardware that affects your overall experience while animating. Better single-threaded performance would result in better performance under active workloads which simply means you will have a more responsive and snappy experience while using your Viewport. On the other hand, CPU rendering takes advantage of better multi-threaded performance.

Now until a few years ago telling which CPU had better single-threaded performance was as easy as just looking at the clock speed of a CPU and which CPU had better multi-threaded performance was as simple as looking at their core counts. It’s no longer that simple that being said that’s why we are here to make it simple.