I just rendered the Blender Classroom test scene on my ASUS Zephyrus G15 which took 33.25 seconds to complete.
*** SEE UPDATE (bottom of blog post)
The test render was done on the Windows 10 Pro platform which performs similarly to Linux when the GPU render option is used. The only other application which was running during the render test was Armory Crate because I wanted to see the temperatures.
Zephyrus G15 Temperatures
While the laptop rendered the classroom test scene, the CPU temperature reached 95 °C which is 203 Fahrenheit.
Both, the CPU usage as well as the GPU usage graph maxes out at 100% for the 33 second duration and declined back to almost zero values shortly after the render was finished.
Normal values are ~2% CPU and 0% GPU.
The laptop is set to the Performance profile which seems to give me the best of both worlds when I run Unreal Engine 5. All in all, these stats are impressive for a portable device and when I have some more time, I will rig up my DELL workstation and rerun the same test on an GTX 1070 Ti.
There are quite a few “YouTubers” who have reviewed the ASUS Zephyrus G15 and state that the RTX 3080 option is not worth it. I disagree. This laptop rips trough anything and everything I throw at it. Because of the 32gb of RAM, UE5 runs exceptionally well, which is even more amazing when one considers the display resolution of 1440p.
If you are in the business of creating visuals and portability is a requirement, then the Zephyrus line of laptops is hard to beat. I am 100% happy with my purchase, especially since this laptop is also Linux compatible.
Thank you for reading. As always, I’m happy to answer your comments.
Update
Well, some things have changed since I’ve published this blog post. For starters, installing Linux on the Zephyrus G15 has been put on hold (see this blog post for why I chose not to install Linux) and just for fun, I converted my DELL graphics workstation which was running openSUSE Tumbleweed to Windows 11 (latest developer build).
Today, I’ve rendered the classroom.blend file with the DELL Inspiron 5680 which has an NVIDIA 1070 Ti 8Gb GFX card. The render test was conducted under the same conditions with fresh reboot and nothing else open except file explorer to load the .blend file.
Compared to the Zephyrus with the mobile mobile NVIIDIA 3080 graphics card, the desktop NVIDIA 1070 took a whopping 1:50.41 (one minute and 52.4 seconds) compared to the laptop which rendered the exact same .blend file in just 33.25 seconds. Both GFX cards have 8 Gig RAM.
I am both, happy and disappointed because I was hoping that the desktop and mobile versions wouldn’t be so far apart. Then again, I am glad to know how powerful the RTX 3080 actually is.
Bonus test. I’ve also rendered the BMW test file again and am happy to say that there was no difference between Linux and Windows on the same PC. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was a bit faster with mitigations off but W11 rendered two seconds faster (53 instead of 55 seconds) with mitigations on.
