Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

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"...I can't help but notice that you (and others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle..."

I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...

but I can't.

because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?

Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.

I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.

Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?

What kind of art are you talking about? I've done much graphic design (yes, paid) and used Photoshop and Illustrator for nearly a decade (though I now use Affinity, as of last year), and I have never been in a situation where I was running out of resources.

Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.

Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?

To be fair, I think most people's interaction with "graphics arts" is Lightroom, which is a pretty darn slow piece of software. Not the complicated stuff, where they reused code from Photoshop, but the simple stuff like opening the file import dialog.

I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)

"...Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?.."

Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)

Ah I see. Yeah, I don't do any video or CGI.

The two CGI and Animation shops I've worked at have had most of the artists on Linux boxes...

Yes, this is the case in most of all VFX and animation studios. Pretty much everything is done on Linux, usually CentOS. That being said 8GB is a joke. 32GB is minimum and 64GB is what new machines would be ordered with for almost all artist workstations.

Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.

Our artists at work were drowning with 8 GB of RAM. Upgrading them to 16 GB made a substantial difference for them.

Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.

> Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance

Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.

Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.

I had same issue but at home where my work flow is different. My solution was to use the extension "The great suspender" which sleeps tabs that hasn't been used in a while. Might help you too.

Firefox is even worse. I caught it using 37GB virt the other day on Linux and a pretty significant chunk of RAM too. I don't even have 37GB of physical memory.

"Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari." This is so true. I've recently stopped using Chrome and switched to Safari. Now my 5-year old MacBook Pro runs like butter.

Browsers and web is frankly getting ridiculous. The modern web has a lot going for it but when moving the web forward people seem to completely forget about the efficiency argument. I wonder how much of the worlds power we waste casually like that.

As a developer and a digital artist I am often running multiple VMs, my various development tools and 2-5 Adobe products on top of my 2 browsers and other misc programs. Agreed that for any single piece of digital design software 16gb should be enough (even to a certain extent After Effects). But if I could have a high quality laptop, that runs Adobe software, is Unix-y AND run the whole Adobe suite plus my development tools... (whilst not having to close all my research notes in Firefox)... gee whizz would I throw my money at that.

I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.

I don't think you're an outlier at all. 32GB is the absolute minimum I need to get my work done without disk thrashing. If I spent more time on video than audio I'd want 64GB.

That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.

The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.

Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?

It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.

It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."

Most people I know working as professional artists/designers are working with 2D assets in software like photoshop. Even the few working in print don't need crazy GPUs. I know some people who deal with video and 3d but most of them farm out to servers to do the heavy lifting. I'm not sure what you do but in my experience this is more than enough for most digital artists and designers.

I don't know if you saw this posted elsewhere in the thread but this is a pretty solid endorsement: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

Considering the extremely long time between hardware refresh on the MacBook Pro I entirely share your sentiment and am agog Apple didn't wait for a suitable Kaby Lake part. People have been waiting years, what's another six months? If you're going to charge me top end prices bloody give me top end hardware. It isn't simply top end by definition with a Microsoft or Apple logo plastered on the side, sorry.

I don't care as much if the hardware is "top end", but I do require that it lasts, my surface 3 keyboard didn't last a year.

This is 100% where I'm at. I'd buy a Surface Monitor right now, because I could be assured to use it on a...well, I almost said "a real computer", and I feel a little bad for that, but I also sorta don't. I need forward compatibility with my hardware, and my workstation already blows the doors off the little box they've saddled that great monitor with.

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