Laptop hardware for large clouds

[n.dafinski]

Hello, I'll be having to work with some decently sized clouds from now on, most of them will probably be up to 500m but I guess some could get up to a billion in very rare cases. Until now I've only worked on clouds up to about 200m but my laptop with an i7 and only 16 gb ram ( it has some MX series graphics card, i think MX450 with 2GB vram ) is already struggling quite a bit. So I'd be looking to upgrade and I am looking for some recommendations. I suppose getting 32 GB of ram is a no-brainer ( should I even go for 64? ), but is it worth looking into some of AMD's Ryzen processors for their multicore capabilities or is the performance between Intel and AMD quite similar? As for GPU, I guess getting a geforce series card is advisable, I've read somehwere that CloudCompare doesn't actually use the GPU for calculations but only the VRAM for showing massive point clouds, is that still true or has something changed? Thanks for any tips, they'd be greatly appreciated

[daniel]

Yes, we only use VRAM to speed-up the display. The latest version of CC should improve the performances with AMD graphic cards, but I believe NVidia is still faster. For more than 500 M. points, it will always bit slow I guess (at least until the LoD mechanism is ready). Generally it's a good idea to use the command line tool if you can first (to decimate the cloud for instance, etc.).

And indeed, computation is performed solely on the CPU (so adding more cores generally helps). And I don't have any data to compare Intel and AMD processors.

For the memory, the more the better! Especially for very large clouds.