I’m new to Nomad. I do 3d modelling and sculpting on Blender, but recently my back hurts with the workload I currently have. Therefore, I need something portable and flexible, Nomad seems like a good choice for my need right now. However, I’m still considering between the base M4 13 model and 1tb (I find pretty good deals for 1tb and 2tb). Hypothetically, I can lie down and scuplt with my macbook with a tablet though. Then, is the 16 gb ram worth it? Considering I do need the characters to be realistic for my game.
Yes you can sculpt more detail with more ram, but i’d say 16gb is sculpting more detail than you’d ever see in a game. At that level you’d be better off enhancing any textures you bake in substance or photoshop.
I have the 11" ipad pro M2 1tb model and I have to say it removed all my previous complaints with modeling and designing. I do not use all of the power it has but I am also no longer restricted and that to me is worth it. My typical models stay roughly under 7 million but I can now bring or build multiple things/characters inside one file and still not notice a hiccup. When it comes time to upgrade again I will never go back to the standard 8gb ram. Just my opinion/experience.
There are plenty examples of folks making great sculpts with iPads back when they only had 3-5 GB of RAM to work with. Staying with the base M4 and its 8GB RAM will land you at a hardware level that’s beyond what the M1/M2 crowd has been working with.
Jumping up to the 1TB and 2TB M4 iPad Pros bumps RAM up to 16GB, but I haven’t lately read anything from our dev @stephomi about the current Nomad versions addressing considerably more. Historically, Nomad has increased its ability to use more RAM as the iPad hardware evolved. By the time M1 iPads came around with its 8GB RAM, Nomad users mostly stopped pointing the finger at insufficient RAM.
If you’re looking for better reasons to splurge for the 16GB versions, it’ll be that all that additional RAM offers better recovery from app suspension. If I have a big unsaved sculpt open in my 2015 or 2020 low-RAM iPad Pros and kick it to the background, all the other activity done subsequent to that (gaming, video editing, browsing, streaming) would have a higher chance that the next time I return to Nomad, it restarts with the default sphere — yes, losing my unsaved sculpt. On this 2024 13” M4 iPad Pro with 1TB (16GB RAM), there’s a likelihood of returning to Nomad with the unsaved work intact.
The other stretch is that the 1TB and 2TB versions have an additional performance core (4 performance, 6 efficiency) The 256GB and 512GB models sport 3 performance and 6 efficiency cores. 9-core to 10-core performance difference in Nomad? It’ll range from seriously negligible to undetectable. My tests between my own three iPad Pros infer this, but it’s beyond the scope of this thread. I’d like to think this is moreso because Nomad is a fantastically efficient app.