Ideal laptop for SLEAP?

[sophiaanner]

Hi SLEAP community,
I’ve been having some issues with running SLEAP on a new laptop, potentially because it has a Blackwell graphics card or maybe because the GPU RAM is only 6GB. I may investigate returning and purchasing a different laptop.

So, my question is: if you were buying a laptop specifically for running SLEAP, what would you get? What would you want in terms of GPU RAM, graphics card, etc?

Thanks,
Sophia

[gitttt-1234]

Hi @sophiaanner !

SLEAP should run on any system where PyTorch is supported. The main limitation is GPU memory (VRAM). For smooth training we recommend:

• NVIDIA GPU with at least 8–12 GB of VRAM (6 GB might be too small and can cause freezes or CUDA OOM errors)
• Macs (M1/M2/M3) run SLEAP on the MPS backend, but can be slower for larger models

Note: While PyTorch supports AMD GPUs via ROCm, SLEAP has not been tested on AMD hardware yet. Attempting to setup ROCm may lead to version-matching issues. NVIDIA CUDA / Apple silicon with MPS is the recommended and fully tested environment as of now.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Thanks,

Divya

[sophiaanner]

Hi @gitttt-1234,

Thanks for getting back to me. The current computer I am trying to use only has 6GB VRAM, which likely explains a whole host of issues I've been having: #2454

Thanks!
Sophia