Has Nvidia just started a new hardware war for creatives?
(Image credit: Future)
Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Isabel Ge Mahe, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Ted Lasso, your MacBook Pro took a hell of a beating! Okay, I'm going a little far, and my apologies to any Bjørge Lillelien fans, but I just watched a Razer Blade 16 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 blitz a new Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max in a timed shootout to render a Stable Diffusion image.
The Razer Blade 16 managed the task, to create a detailed viking illustration, in 9.8 seconds, the MacBook Pro M3 Max did it in 1 minute 14 seconds. I've always overlooked PC laptops in favour of Apple's sleek devices when it comes to digital art, largely because they feel game focused and not for creatives, but my eyes have been opened.
It shouldn't really be such as surprise, Nvidia RTX GPUs inside Nvidia Studio laptops optimised for creative apps has been a mainstay of 3D and animation for years, in fact the Razer Blade 16 is one of our recommended best laptops for animation, but seeing it turned on digital art, and with such brutal results, is alarming (for Apple).
In this particular task, the Nvidia Studio optimised Razer Blade 16 laptop blew away the MacBook Pro M3 Max. (Image credit: Future)
I can hear everyone slapping into their keyboards in fury, so let me face the caveats in this Nvidia vs Apple race. First of all, this was rendering using Stable Diffusion and many artists won't go near AI art for good reason. The problems with AI models outside of Adobe Firefly and Nvidia's own Picasso AI are well known; if in doubt read my interview with Kelly McKernan about her fight for copyrights against AI. So perhaps this test won't impress too many Apple creatives and artists.
Also, the Razer Blade 16 laptop performed so well because Nvidia Studio has been optimised for use with Stable Diffusion. Nvidia is great at updating its Nvidia Studio range of GPUs, laptops and desktops to support to specific apps or tasks. For example, Nvidia RTX Studio laptops and Davinci Resolve are another match made in silicon heaven as are Topaz Labs' AI apps.
But the test does show that for some artists who do want to use intensive AI tools, an Nvidia Studio laptop could be a better option than Apple. Importantly it reveals a new arms race is emerging, one signalled by Apple's launch of the M3 and M3 Max chips last year and confronted head-on by Nvidia this year with new entries in the 40 Series and Nvidia Studio optimisations; better still if these two tech giants go at it to capture the creative market we'll all see a boast in performance in the coming years.
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Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creativebloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and leading video game title Official PlayStation Magazine. In his early career he wrote for music and film magazines including Uncut and SFX. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on AI, digital art and video game art and tech, and more to Creative Bloq, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5. He's also a keen Cricut user and laser cutter fan, and is currently crafting on Glowforge and xTools M1.
