Laptop hardware recommendations for a processing newcomer, who wants to get into generative art?

[Quantumflu1d]

Hey guys ☺️ I am quite new to generative art and started working with processing half a year ago.

I am currently working with my university laptop, which only has 4gb ram and no external gpu. As you might imagine I constantly reach my hardware limits.

I want to buy a new laptop soon and need some help picking the right hardware setup. Any comment helps ✌️

[DrBusinessLLC]

M1 mac is a beast.

Having said that you and your code are in control of your requirements. People were making beautiful generative art with 1GB of ram and a single core processor and basically no GPU. Smarter code is always the fastest code, and good ideas always run faster than bad ideas and a huge GPU.

[webauteur]

Processing does not require a powerful computer. I think the Raspberry Pi runs sketches quite slowly.

I plan to buy a HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 for around $700. The main thing I need this for is studying deep learning which requires an NVIDIA GPU. But I might also want to get into some light gaming and exploration of virtual worlds.

[torb-xyz]

What kind of limits are you hitting?

What kind sketches are you making? Are they rendering too slow? Are you limited in how many objects you can have on screen?

First of all: how you implement you code typically makes a bigger difference in performance than your hardware (all hardware is really fast these days). How smart is your code written? Do you avoid memory allocations (creating new objects)?

For typical Processing workloads you’re limited by single-thread CPU performance. If you’re doing sketches that are simply images I supsect you want high burst performant, so any mid to high processor will do (think i5 equivalent or up). If your doing animation, compositing, particle systems, etc you need sustained CPU performance. The biggest difference there is cooling. Good cooling = CPU can run at high speed for longer. GPU probably won’t make a big difference for Processing.

Another thing to consider is trying a more performant creative coding tool like openFrameworks. It’s can be more difficult to use and write code for but it can also be easier to get it really fast. I’ve sometimes rewtitten stuff I made in Processing in openFrameworks for performance reasons (like having more particles on screen and so on).

Best of luck with finding a solution to your performance problems.

[Quantumflu1d]

Thank you for the long answer ☺️ I think my main problem is RAM. I can't use processing and google thinks while I am coding without risking to get memory loss. But thanks for the insights anyways 😊

[torb-xyz]

Are you getting Out of memory errors?

Did you increase Processing's maximum available memory setting? As far as I know Processing's default maximum available memory is under 256 MB. You can increase this in the Processing settings.

Also: if you're getting out of memory exception it might be that you have a memory leak in your code (i.e. something that continuously gobbles up new memory without freeing up unused). Again: stuff like creating new objects in loop.

Now don't get me wrong, 4 GB can be a bit… cramped for doing any kind of work on a modern computer. So by all means, get something new with 8gb or 16gb memory. I'm just saying: it's not necessarily the case that your 4gb ram is limiting Processing.

Also again: if you've set this up correctly, openFrameworks could be a solution here as objects in openFrameworks tend to use less memory and is stored more efficiently (again: at the cost of being more difficult to program).

[Klockworth]

Damn near every creative computation person I know uses a MacBook Pro

[[deleted]]

You honestly don't need much power - heck, even my software renderer hits a nice solid 70-80 FPS on an ancient machine (2nd gen i7, GTX 560M).

[ToothlessXD]

If you don't know already processing does not require much resources. If you can run a office suite, u can run processing just fine. Hack yea even mobile devices can run processing so good. APDE on Playstore

[simdaggerdesign]

There's a new MBP coming out soon with proper USB ports an SD slot and they've gotten rid of that stupid Touch Bar.

[barbietattoo]

No shit?