GIS and 3D Accelerators

[h1user]

I'll soon be entering the GIS / data analitics world and want to upgrade my work laptop. My workplace is currently providing a Xeon E-2276M with a basic Nividia Quattro, but the GPU is burned off and the laptop is heavy and wayyy too power hungry to be portable (90min battery life despite a brand new battery). I'm working in a public transport organisation, so my work will basically be transport analitics.

I was wondering if I sould still look for a laptop with an Nvidia GPU (and why), because I've seen Intel make massive progress in the recents years GPU wise.

Thanks for any feedback!

[CodyPatterson]

Hey @h1user 

This resource here may help you out a bit with your decisions. 90 minute life is definitely quite short for what you are doing, but the better the card, the more power draw.

https://downloads.esri.com/support/whitepapers/ao_/3d_analyst_graphics_accelerator1.pdf

Hope that helps!

Cody

[CodyPatterson]

Update, after looking more into the link, I noticed that many of these cards are from easily more than two decades old. The main reason that NVIDIA is preferred is due to CUDA cores able to assist with the information processing. This allows for deep learning and machine learning to work efficiently, in the case of your analytics, a Quadro card would more than likely pull its weight, and many business laptops can pull their weight with one very effectively!

Cody