GPUs for content creators

A lot of brands are releasing new laptops under the idea that they are designed for creators or professionals. Is it more CPU or GPU based for creative software like adobe? I always thought rendering for illustrator, premiere, and other apps used CPU cores to do the bulk of the work.

 

Above all, its marketing, some of those laptops have better displays, but CPU and GPU wise they all use the same parts.

 

Adobe suites do support OpenCL and CUDA, so they should be able to use the GPU's to accelerate workloads.
If you are specifically using Adobe, NV might be a better choice, however, AMD gpu's do have higher compute capabilities, so technically they should be able to do these types of workloads better (still, the market can also be biased towards NV in regards to dev support, mainly because NV can afford to pay devs to optimise software for their GPU's).

I wouldn't really gravitate towards laptops with Quadro or Radeon PRO gpu's because they are usually just consumer GPU's with different drivers (and very expensive to boot).

The Acer Helios 500 PH517-61 has Ryzen 2700 and Vega 56 (which also works excellent with Radeon Pro Enterprise drivers that are quite useful for content creation and have same performance in games as consumer drivers).

The Vega 56 in that laptop is basically a desktop one just mildly underclocked and limited to 120W... however it still has powerful compute, and the laptop has ridiculous cooling (even better than a lot of desktops) - and the GPU can be overclocked to match desktop GTX 1080 more or less within the same 120W TDP.
Plus it comes with unlocked 8 cores and 16 threads of desktop 2700 chip which can be overclocked (but technically, you CAN put 2700x into that laptop without worrying about thermals - the cooling is quite powerful).

On the AMD side at least, this would be (at least right now) the most powerful laptop option available for content creation (and obviously gaming).

But this laptop is an 'anomaly' in the market... and not the norm.
NV gpu's dominate the laptop market mostly and the regular drivers can still use CUDA to accelerate workloads.

If you are partial to Intel/NV combo, then there are several options to choose from.

But various software is capable of utilising both CPU and GPU for content creation (Adobe is I think similar in that regard).

So what you would need is a good (affordable) balance between the CPU and GPU in a laptop (just make sure the cooling is strong enough for the hw to reach/maintain its advertised boost clocks for as long as you need them) - bear in mind that for some Intel/NV laptops you may need to open them up and repaste as OEM's tend not to do good job with the thermal compound (though the Acer Helios 500 with AMD hw doesn't suffer from this problem).

As I said, if you want to give Acer Helios 500 with 2700 and V56 a go, you certainly can (and it can be upgraded up to 64GB (the only trick is reaching 2 RAM slots beneath the kb which require the unit to be disassembled, the other 2 RAM slots are easily accessed though and you can still add say 2x16GB to those slots), and of course it has 1 m.2 and 1 NVme slots for SSD's (along with a separate SATA HDD - so you should be fine with storage).

Barring that, Intel/NV would likely be your choice (though I think you want at least to have a GTX 2060 in the laptop these days).

MSI I think should release a laptop with Ryzen 3900 (12c/24th desktop CPU) and NV GTX 1060 (for the life of me, I don't understand why they aimed to put a workstation CPU and pair it with a weak GPU - you'd expect a 2060 inside at least).

 

You probably meant 1660 Ti. Pascal hasn't been used in new laptops for over a year now.

 

I stand corrected.
Yes, the laptop in question would have Ryzen 3900 and 1660Ti.
However, it doesn't appear to be released yet.

 

Assuming you doing mostly 1080p video editing (not 4k or briefly) a 1050 ti or better should be a good place to start, with 3ghz quadcore cpu or better and atleast 16gb ram a good IPS lcd will be great.

But overall it depends on how long your videos are and how good quality they are. Me personally i use a quad xeon e7-8880 v3/1060 desktop for realistic 3d animations and can take a day of rendering for 4min 4k video, but while just editing and some special effects on a super 35 4k video of 20min vid can take upwards of 5 hrs of rendering on my laptop (9900k/gtx 1080/48gb). so it greatly depends on what type of content you making, as a content creator your content will soon get more intricate and resource demandedly creative, so have some upgrade ability room (mobile workstations not ultrabooks if this your main computer).

But a 1050ti level or better computer will get the job done