3ds max on a Chromebook?

[actrask]

I'm looking for something small I can take around and noodle on 3ds max with. Are Chromebooks powerful enough nowadays to navigate small 3ds max scenes and a tiny Corona IR viewport? This wouldn't be used for production, think more of a 3D sketchpad.

[Philip kelly]

Chromebooks are not for loading software as far as I'm aware .
They are like a window to a server so to speak.
Everything is offline somewhere else.

I could  be wrong.

[pokoy]

Chromebooks run Android afaik, Max is only available for Windows.

[Juraj]

Chrome books will be able to launch Windows 10 soon enough, that is, the most powerful non-Arm versions at least.

At that point, they're still too weak to run 3dsMax, let alone IR.

Truth be told, even the most powerful quad-core laptops are too weak to make IR anything remotely useful but nVidia card equipped models can make it useful through instant Optix denoiser (included in latest Corona daily build). That thing is quite a game changer, making even weak device useful for previews.

Personally the only device I can suggest is Dell XPS 15 and that is because 13 version doesn't have dedicated card. XPS15 is still smaller than many other 13" devices anyway. Mobile GTX 1050 with 4GB Vram is good enough for Optix.
It's also reasonably priced for what you get, there are some thin gaming laptops recently surfaced, but they're quite expensive and XPS is still smaller in footprint and of course, lighter.

[TomG]

At the moment, there's still some uncertainty about mobile GPUs being able to run Optix / the AI denoisier - for example, my laptop has a 960M, which is based on the Kepler architecture so should in theory work; however all it does is crash, even on the simplest scenes. So for using the NVIDIA denoiser on a laptop, you'd really have to test it out first.

(as a note, this laptop is the one I use for demos at events, and IR etc is manageable without the AI Denoiser - not a patch on a desktop of course, but still manageable for on-the-go portability; it's a Lenovo Y700 touch, and except for some wonkiness with the hard drive which seems to have got 6 times slower over the last year, it works ok as a portable demo machine; I'm going to try replacing the HD with an SSD and see if that fixes it, we'll see!)

[maru]

I'm going to try replacing the HD with an SSD and see if that fixes it, we'll see!)

Just do it. It solved all my problems after the Lenovo service replaced the HDD 3 times. :)

[TomG]

I'm going to try replacing the HD with an SSD and see if that fixes it, we'll see!)

Just do it. It solved all my problems after the Lenovo service replaced the HDD 3 times. :)

Definitely going to order something as soon as I get back home (Friday). I will report in on whether it helped! Weird that it used to work super fine and now is like a snail for loading things etc (but rendering speed etc seems unchanged, so really does look like the disk access stuff). It was your experience that lead me to think there's something crappy about the  drives Lenovo is using :)

[Juraj]

Tom, there is no reason to use HDDs for system drive since 2013 at least :- ).

You can defragment HDD which would bring you to your original performance partly, but that is still snails compared to SSD.

500/512GB drives goes for as low as 100 bucks.

[TomG]

Tom, there is no reason to use HDDs for system drive since 2013 at least :- ).

You can defragment HDD which would bring you to your original performance partly, but that is still snails compared to SSD.

500/512GB drives goes for as low as 100 bucks.

Agreed! There is something weird going on though, since the machine worked fine when I got it but has got slower to boot and load applications over time, and a defrag hasn't restored it (which makes me worry it isn't the drive) - the Lenovo tools report no problem with the drive access.... yet the machine would boot in 30 seconds before, but now takes like 4 minutes and takes ages to open Photoshop etc. With the pricing of SSDs now it can't hurt to try, and I sure will! I just hope that does fix it! The next step will be to just restore everything back to factory and load things up again, I guess :(

[Juraj]

Well, it never hurts to do a clean install from time to time.

[pokoy]

I didn't know Chromebooks can boot Windows, learnt something new today.