The studio that fits on your lap

sponsored by NVIDIA

Want to get better at something creative? We’re talking about cutting-edge fields like video editing, 3D modelling, digital photography, game design and digital art.

Before Malcolm Gladwell turns up and starts lecturing you about how you need to spend 10,000 hours practising your craft, we have something to say about laptops. They are tools you can use to make your projects a reality and, with a bit of work, turn a passion into a career. And the first place to head is the NVIDIA Studio line, a small army of which are available from scan.co.uk.

These are not laptops made by NVIDIA. Many of the biggest and best laptop makers are part of the programme, from gamer favourites Razer, MSI and Asus to Microsoft itself.

NVIDIA Studio is a seal of approval that tells you a laptop has not just a high-performance NVIDIA graphics card but also a vivid display, fast storage and super-fast RAM.

These are useful characteristics for almost any creative field where you work from a PC. Say you want to try your hand as a YouTuber – an application like Adobe Premiere Pro thrives with plenty of RAM, and when you come to colour-grade your videos you really want a rich and colour-accurate screen.

Contains graphic scenes

The core of any NVIDIA Studio laptop is, of course, the graphics processor. With NVIDIA Studio you can get models with either the consumer-level GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards or pro-optimised Quadro models.

Cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 inside the Razer Blade 14 (see left) are usually thought of as gaming powerhouses, but there’s much more to them than that. When you come to download your GPU drivers you can choose between the Game Ready line, made for optimal compatibility with the latest games, or NVIDIA Studio Drivers. These are built for the best performance and stability with the applications that creative pros use as standard.

To give a better idea of why the power of an NVIDIA Studio laptop matters, we’re going to get a bit more specific with what some of those pros do in those apps.

Video editing apps like DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro can harness the power of NVIDIA’s RTX 30-series CUDA cores and NVENC and NVDEC to dramatically speed up the encoding and decoding of video. When you come to finalise your project for upload, you won’t be left waiting for hours watching the progress bar crawl by.

The most powerful cards can playback extreme-quality Redcode RAW 8K footage in real-time. You won’t feel the limits of your tech pushing back against your workflow – that’s the dream result. And DaVinci Resolve’s special effects – such as Object Removal, Speed Warp and Smart Reframe – leverage the power of NVIDIA RTX series Tensor cores.

AI-powered creativity

These cores are optimised for AI workloads, and there’s also a load of AI going on in some of the latest photographic manipulation tools offered by Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

Lightroom’s Super Resolution feature lets you upscale images massively while retaining clean, sharp lines – handy for snappers who want to crop into their stills without losing clarity.

Photoshop’s neural filters dig even further into the potential of AI. Our favourite of the moment is Smart Portrait, which lets you tweak the eye direction, hair thickness and lighting of portraits (and more) just by playing with a few sliders. It’s photography wizardry that can push some laptops to breaking point… but not an NVIDIA Studio one.

Top picks supercharged by NVIDIA Studio

Razer Blade 14

Creator laptops don’t have to be huge. This 14in Razer weighs less than 1.8kg but has a super-high-end GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card: all of the power, none of the bulk. It’s also one of the most moodily stylish performance laptops around, decked out in black anodised aluminium throughout, while the per-key RGB keyboard backlight adds visual sauce.

ASUS VivoBook Pro 16

An OLED screen makes this laptop ideal for all sorts of image-based work. Emissive pixels deliver perfect contrast, and the 100% DCI-P3 colour coverage is fantastic. Its 32GB RAM is ideal for 4K video editing, and the trackpad has a feature you won’t see elsewhere: Asus DialPad. This embeds a virtual wheel into the surface for use with Adobe apps.