Ten laptops from the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo have joined Nvidia's RTX Studio program, which designates them as being made specifically for content creators. Those models join the 17 RTX Studio laptops revealed at Computex 2019, where Nvidia first unveiled its Studio platform/branding campaign.
The laptops joining Nvidia RTX Studio include the Lenovo Legion Y740 (15 and 17-inch), ThinkPad P53 and P73, the Dell Precision P7540 and P7740, the HP ZBook 15 and 17, and 15- and 17-inch versions of the goBOXX SLM mobile workstation from Austin, Texas-based BOXX.
As you'll notice, many of these laptops are already available and some are just the same laptop with different screen sizes. Still, Nvidia has retroactively accepted them into the Studio program, which gets them a sticker and custom Nvidia APIs and drivers that maximize performance when rendering, video editing and processing animations.
Speaking of which, Nvidia also announced a new Studio driver that adds 30-bit color support for OpenGL applications like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. Before, you had to buy a workstation-level Quadro RTX GPU to work with HDR images. 30-bit support should remove artifacts seen in 24-bit photos (see above) and allow for more accurate, deeper colors. Nvidia also listed new creative apps that support RTX, including Adobe Substance Painter, Autodesk Flame, Blender Cycles and Dimension 5 D5 Fusion.
The next time you go laptop hunting, look for an RTX Studio sticker on the deck of some pricier machines, which indicates that they're specced with components that Nvidia considers fit for content creation. Requirements to be considered an RTX Studio laptop include a 1080p or 4K display, an H-series Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and Quadro RTX graphics or RTX 2080, 2070 and 1060 Max-Q GPUs.
When Nvidia RTX Studio was first unveiled, we feared it could end up being more of a marketing scheme than an initiative to improve Windows laptops for creators. However, with this week's announcement, Nvidia has taken a big step toward proving us wrong.
