Oh my god

[stratvox]

This game looks AMAZING at 4k.

[stratvox]

Seriously, if there's any way you can swing it, you really want to play it on a rig that can do 4k.

[stratvox]

2 minutes ago, Dum_Gen said:

If you can't afford hardware, you should try GeForce Now... Oh wait, nevermind.

Still trolling! 

Always interesting seeing people take the side of a multi-billion dollar transnational company over the side of those nasty cruel small indie game houses trying to protect their IP rights.

But you do you.

[Guest jeffpeng]

Hu! I guess your 5700 (XT?) is enough for 4K? I mean TLD isn't "that" demanding, after all.

[ajb1978]

The best part about 4K is you can pick out wolves from like 4 times as far away.  Sure, they might show up as a single black pixel, but if that black pixel is moving you know it's not a rock.

[Guest jeffpeng]

6 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

The best part about 4K is you can pick out wolves from like 4 times as far away.  Sure, they might show up as a single black pixel, but if that black pixel is moving you know it's not a rock.

Surprise turnaround!
 

CHANGELIST v1.81

HIGHLIGHTS

• Added moving rocks.

[stratvox]

On 3/27/2020 at 11:12 AM, jeffpeng said:

Hu! I guess your 5700 (XT?) is enough for 4K? I mean TLD isn't "that" demanding, after all.

Yeah, I bought a new computer. It's a monster. TLD runs great. So does Overload and KSP. And I mean great; everything's turned all the way up and it's always liquid smooth. I think the pcie4 bus is making a big difference for the video card; I swear that some of the games are performing better at 4k than they were at HD on my old machine which, after all, had the same video card in it.

The ability to see further is amazing. @ajb1978 is completely right about this. When I'm standing in the maintenance shed looking out through the window towards the hunting lodge on a nice clear day, I can see the flag on the pole at the lodge flapping in the breeze. It's great.

[Bean]

I like playing on the PS4 over the computer because my tv is 4K and the screen is 65”.  Very immersive and pretty.  

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 4/17/2020 at 4:05 PM, stratvox said:

 I think the pcie4 bus is making a big difference for the video card

I know many like to downplay this a lot and quote how even a "2080Ti" doesn't saturate PCIe 3.0. That's technically even true, but when we are talking computations that have to finish in microseconds (1/60th of a second is just 16ms) you don't have to constantly saturate your bandwidth to still get improvements from higher possible peak bandwidth. A lot of frame stutter is from instances the GPU actually has to retrieve data from somewhere else, and with high bandwidth low latency storage this doesn't even have to be the system memory to benefit rendering. It's a bit like a sports care that still isn't allowed to drive faster than the road speed limit, but it sure accelerates a heckton faster than your Prius. 

Considering how good my current card has aged (an RX 290) .... yeah, I'm finally getting that 5700 when the entire human malware situation has somewhat resolved.

[Hotzn]

Grrch... shouldn't have looked into this thread, now I want to upgrade my rig. No, I have to be more precise: I want a new one. Since you guys here are presumably ahead on hardware knowledge: Any tips? How much approx. would I have to invest to get there (I'm in EURO country)? And: Better buy it ready-to-use? Or better have it assembled by my dealer?

[Aurimas]

5 hours ago, Hotzn said:

Better buy it ready-to-use? Or better have it assembled by my dealer?

Why not assemble it yourself? .. I'd guess you could run TLD on 4k monitor for some 700 of your money (excluding monitor itself) .. but sure you can always invest for the future in which case there is no roof for the price..

[hozz1235]

On 3/27/2020 at 5:54 AM, stratvox said:

This game looks AMAZING at 4k.

I play on PC (laptop) and the price of UHD laptops are still pretty darn high   Darn you, @stratvox for telling me what I'm missing!! 😝

Edited April 20, 2020 by hozz1235

[stratvox]

On 4/17/2020 at 10:58 PM, Bean said:

I like playing on the PS4 over the computer because my tv is 4K and the screen is 65”.  Very immersive and pretty.  

Aye. My computer's plugged into a 4k tv. It works well enough as a monitor for my day job, and looks really nice when I want to watch movies or something... like TLD.

On 4/18/2020 at 4:09 PM, jeffpeng said:

when we are talking computations that have to finish in microseconds (1/60th of a second is just 16ms) you don't have to constantly saturate your bandwidth to still get improvements from higher possible peak bandwidth. A lot of frame stutter is from instances the GPU actually has to retrieve data from somewhere else, and with high bandwidth low latency storage this doesn't even have to be the system memory to benefit rendering.

Or everything else. The PCIe4 nvme M.2 1TB RAID I'm running all this off makes a huge difference to how snappy everything is. I was careful when I bought the parts; this system all fits together like a glove for maximum performance from everything. I'm totally blown away by the video improvement, though; I knew it would get better with the much faster bus but not THIS much better. I just downloaded and installed doom 2016, am running vertical sync, with ultra settings, and it's just 60 Hz according to the number up in the corner unless I'm loading a level. Sometimes it'll flicker a bit when there's heavy combat going on, but you can never see any number other than sixty ever.

It's true what you said, we're living in the weird world where linux native games almost always have issues (e.g. unity) but running the windows under emulation of the api can end with better actual performance than running the game in windows.

This is my first real experience running an amd video card under linux; I don't buy machines very often and it's always been nvidia before now. The UX is so much better with this card than it is with the nvidia proprietary drivers, even considering how much the graphics-drivers ppa takes a lot of the pain out of keeping the kernel and the nvidia drivers in proper sync across kernel updates, everything just works all the time.

12 hours ago, Hotzn said:

Grrch... shouldn't have looked into this thread, now I want to upgrade my rig. No, I have to be more precise: I want a new one. Since you guys here are presumably ahead on hardware knowledge: Any tips? How much approx. would I have to invest to get there (I'm in EURO country)? And: Better buy it ready-to-use? Or better have it assembled by my dealer?

I had my dealer build this one. In the old days (koff koff a-HEM!) I'd have done it myself but having them do it greatly simplified warranty issues, so... and they're all good guys to boot; I know them because I've cycled a lot of hardware through that place in my daystar job role as sysadmin to a distributed computing startup.

I spent a lot of money on this machine, and it's way overpowered in some ways for the job of running this game. The high points are:

• ryzen 3950x (16 core ryzen) <- this cpu is AMAZING.
• 32GB 3600 MHz RAM <- if you buy ryzen get 3600 MHz RAM so the infinity fabric that handles inter-core comms can run at its full speed of 1800 MHz.
• 2 Corsair 1TB PCIe gen4 nvme m.2 drives <- I have them in a software RAID; I have benched large file reads at app. 8.5-9GB/s (that's bytes, not bits!)
• radeon 5700xt <- I actually bought this early last fall to replace my showing-signs-of-its-age 1060. It's also a PCIe 4 card which is part of the reason I think it's been hammering these games out so well at 4K; there's enough pixels (i.e. picture elements) that bandwidth matters; if you have to shovel that many pixels at 16 bit colour depth that's just a lot of data.
• Gigabyte Aorus Master X570 mainboard <- A very good quality board with the right power support (VRMs) to be able to deliver good clean power to the CPU.
• 850W power supply <- some people will say I have overspent here because the power supply is generally not going to be delivering much more than sixty percent or so of capacity. My time working in data centres tells me that power supplies that don't ever have to work above 80% capacity tend to last for literally years longer than ones that are operating at the outside edge of their capacity envelope all the time due to running components at the outside edge of their operating temperatures.
• 250W TDP air cooler <- AMD recommends water coolers but I went with air because there're less things to break. This part also has a lot of headroom compared to what the power output of the heat from this CPU is stated to be: AMD says 95W, independent testing says 150W, I went way high again because keeping the temperatures down extends component life significantly. I ran a 33 worker workload from our distributed computing software (you can check it out at https://portal.distributed.computer if you like) which is one more worker than available threads for on this CPU for 24 hours to check performance; according to /proc/cpuinfo, uptime, and psensors I ended up with a system load of around 35 (so I'm definitely saturating the CPU), and a sustained clock of 4.2GHz across all cores with a temperature steady state fluctuating between 62C and 65C -- well within its operating range and low enough to ensure that it doesn't suffer from thermal throttling of its clocks.

This machine cost me ~3200$CDN taxes in which translates at current exchange rates to about 2800$USD and 2100€EUR. I anticipate running this computer as my daily driver for a good three years at least, and after that I will put it to work in another role in my home network. I should note that I work as a system administrator; systems I am currently responsible for include the Distributed Computer (https://portal.distributed.computer) and the Rogers Wireless mail and web to text gateways: I operate in an always on environment and when things are getting hairy (read massive spam attacks on Rogers etc) being able to hammer through gigabytes of logs in very short order can make a real difference in how many of them get through to users before I figure out the magic incantation to make them Go Away. From the POV of running this game, I'd say you could save serious money with something like a ryzen 3600x (six rather than sixteen cores) or 3700x (eight rather than sixteen cores). Make sure you get the X; it's the part that's been binned because it can take higher clock cycles than the non-x parts. Not necessarily so relevant for productivity apps, but it matters a lot for games. Dropping the core count means you can cut back on the cpu cooler as well, which'll save some dough.  Whatever you do in order to ensure the best performance out of your CPU get no less than 3600 MHz RAM. You can also save significantly on the storage; just a plain ol' SSD will cost you a hundred bucks or so, not the nearly eight hundred that my pair of high end nvme sticks cost. Between those two things (CPU, storage) you can easily shave a thousand bucks CDN off the 3200 I paid for all of it. Also, from what I've heard chances are good that if you're in the US or the Euro area there will be some savings due to differences in how distribution works for computer parts, which is seriously broken imho in Canada and not just for computer parts.

Edited April 20, 2020 by stratvox
clarification

[Guest jeffpeng]

@stratvoxThat's pretty much the perfect upper-mid-range machine to own right now. I wouldn't recommend anything else. Except a bit more ram for big compiles 😄 (Think Chromium) But that's very specific me.

I'm here on my R5 3600 and my old B450, but that's a stopgap solution as I already know where to put that hardware later (son's getting those ^^). I cannot stress enough how much fast, low latency storage and high interconnect bandwidth will gain in importance in the next 2 years, and also how 6 CPU cores and sub 8GB of VRAM will not be enough. Both in terms of near-future proofing and bang for the buck there really aren't many ways around an AMD solution right now. 

Another important part ... yeah, if you want to have a stable, predictable and lasting system, especially if it has to double as you poor-man's workstation like in my case ..... agreed on the air cooling, agreed on the power supply. For a PSU .... buy twice what you think you'll need, and you'll be good for a decade. Also: Air coolers are more reliable, simply because there are less moving parts involved, and from an engineer's standpoint: The heat has to be dumped into the air eventually anyways.

Lastly, a probably not so well known fact for many people: cool silicon keeps cooler. The warmer conductors get, the higher the impendance, the more power they draw, the warmer they get. Vice versa the cooler they are the less impendance, the less power they draw, the cooler they are. It's the same mechanic that can melt copper wire in a cable if you put too much load on it, just on a minature scale. And less thermal stresses can make an easy difference between your part lasting 2 years or 10 - which is also the reason I'm not a big fan of manual overclocking ... but the AMD CPUs do that best themselves anyways.

So, in short, everyone .... if you want a well balanced system that will blow you away for reasonable pricing and last at least one console generation..... buy @stratvox's PC - and at worst replace the GPU in 2 years if you feel like having (actual) ray tracing when it (actually) becomes relevant. Everything else is good for at least half a decade. If you have to cut corners ... cut with one of the NVMe drives, but personally I feel at least a PCIe Gen 3 SSD will become mandatory fast, and if you really have to save money, cut down the CPU, but no less than the 3700X, as everything below 8 cores will also become old real quick. Maybe wait for the B550 Motherboards if you want to save a buck, but don't miss out on PCIe 4.

Also:

Yeah, about the Windows-on-Linux versions running faster: There are two key factors, I think. One is that the windows task scheduler still isn't up to snuff when it comes to properly distribute workload among several cores, especially if the architecture is non-uniform. A big advantage intel still has is that their mainstream CPUs have equal "distances" to all memories from every core. This is already not true for their HEDT parts, and definitely not for their dual-die and/or multi socket server parts. There you run into the same issues, and those issues persist even on Windows Terminal Servers which should be able to properly address non-uniform memory metrics.

The other is the highly modular structure of the windows kernel, that is really beginning to show why Linux never moved away from a monolithic kernel. The argument that the overhead is negligible becomes less and less true the more context switches a CPU has to perform, and with IO finally closing the gap with raw computation this becomes an every increasing issue. Context switches are incredibly costly for a CPU, but unavoidable on a low latency platform. With the monolithic design of the Linux kernel there are much less of those required, basically everything that is pumped through the Hardware Abstraction Layer under Windows the Linux kernel is basically running on the "metal".  In many ways, unintuitively, Linux is much better equipped to run a low latency low overhead system. It's a shame the Steam OS initiative wasn't more successful, because the games that run well under Linux actually _run_.

Edited April 21, 2020 by jeffpeng

[peteloud]

I manage to play the game very satisfactorily on a redundant office computer,  Xeon 3.20 GHz, 16GB RAM, with R7 360 graphics and a 1920 x 1080 display.   There's no need to spend a fortune on the latest, fancy, expensive equipment.

[Guest jeffpeng]

1 hour ago, peteloud said:

I manage to play the game very satisfactorily on a redundant office computer,  Xeon 3.20 GHz, 16GB RAM, with R7 360 graphics and a 1920 x 1080 display.   There's no need to spend a fortune on the latest, fancy, expensive equipment.

That's pretty beefy for your "redundant" office computer 😄

Plus, afair the thread was about playing this in 4K. For the good old 1080p@60 you should be fine, that's true. But then again everyone has their own idea about what "satisfactorily" means. My current R9 390, which is on the way out (this thing is genius considering its age, but just too loud ....), can keep mostly 60 frames at max settings, but barely. I wouldn't want to dive too deep back into the "more cinematic" era of 30 frames, and while I don't really see the value in more than 60 hz monitors, I really would like to run a 4K display at native resolution, which is just a no-no with my current hardware. So, yeah, I see why one would spend a "fortune" on a modern machine.

[Hotzn]

Thanks a lot @stratvox & @jeffpeng for the explanations. Although some of it might as well be written in Chinese. When I was a student in the 90s, I built all my PCs myself, and I knew all about the technical specs, where to get the parts at the cheapest price etc. Times long gone, now I am happy when I have a dim notion of what 'cores' are or what 'SSD' means (yay!).

@Aurimas: Why don't I assemble the thing myself now? Because I have a job which allows me to work more (to earn more) or less (earning less as a consequence) as I need/want. If I work a couple of hours more and this allows me to pay for a stylish new PC to be assembled by a professional whom I've known for many years now, I would prefer this to spending three times the hours to re-familiarize myself with building PCs and then many more hours of trial and error, returning parts to the store, getting replacements, and then potentially ending up with errors I can't explain without help. As you get older, you start allocating your resources to get the most out of them. Time is such a resource.

Well, I'm conflicted now... @stratvox, is your top-end configuration necessary to play in 4K? Or is your reduced version sufficient for that? 

[Guest jeffpeng]

@Hotzn Well the CPU isn't as important, at least not for TLD. The interesting part for the high resolution is the Graphics Card, but there are also some significant gains to be had with the AMD platform supporting a new PCIe standard that allows you to push more data to the Graphics Card much faster. Depending on what you have, however, upgrading the Graphics Card as a first step is definitely the most bang-for-buck solution, and, again, depending on what you have, that's an easy pull-out-stick-in replacement you can do with little to experience.

If you really want to buy completely new .... prebuilt or custom, yeah, that's a good question. You usually get better value going custom building it yourself, but while it's not rocket science it's not something you can just do in an afternoon when you do it for the first time (at least the first time in a long time). Also you can actually put the money in the right places. Good example is https://www.csl-computer.com/pc-systeme/pc-systeme-amd-ryzen-5?filter_gpu=69&filter_ram=109 which isn't bad, also not bad in value, but pairing a 3X00 Ryzen CPU with 3000 speed memory is leaving relatively free performance on the table, it's cutting corners with the CPU cooler, and the GPU is a rather loud model.

You could also order a pre-assembled custom PC from places like mindfactory.de, who are my retailer of choice since... uhm.... 2001 or so, but that's going to book 150 additional euros, which lands you at 1200 Euros for the "Reasonable Budget" option with mindfactory: this. Sure you can shave some off of that, too. But reasonable? Even if the Sapphire RX 5700 isn't the cheapest option, no Sapphire card I ever had ever let me down, and this particular model is one of if not the best you can get. The B450 Tomahawk isn't the cheapest option, but it's a rocksolid staple. The memory isn't the absolute cheapest, but it's certified to work with the 2700X and that board at the advertised speed - etc. The case isn't the cheapest - but it's easy to work in, and has good build quality. You get the picture. It's a good compromise - I believe - without making too many compromises.

If the maximum amount of non-stupid-compromise is what you are looking for, that's probably this for 950, but at that point I'd go with the prebuilt from CSL I linked above, while this is what I would call reasonbly future proof, expandable and ready to play all the stuff the new console generation will throw at you: this for roundabout 2K.

It's always a question of what you want and what you need. If you want to buy a PC just for The Long Dark in 4K the non-stupid-value option will do, so will the CSL system, and so will a reasonably recent existing PC after putting in a new Graphics card. If you want to play most stuff at good details in 4K now and don't really care about maybe buying a new PC in 2 years, then the "Reasonable Budget" option will do, and maybe a PC 2-3 years old with a new Graphics card will be fine, too. If you want to put this under your desk and worry again in 4 to 5 years .... It's the 2K option.

Maybe you can give us some info what you've got, so you can enjoy TLD in 4K without having to upload an arm and a leg 😉 I used to live in Münster, in which case I would have even inveted you over.... well, except right now that's not really an option ^^

[stratvox]

6 hours ago, peteloud said:

I manage to play the game very satisfactorily on a redundant office computer,  Xeon 3.20 GHz, 16GB RAM, with R7 360 graphics and a 1920 x 1080 display.   There's no need to spend a fortune on the latest, fancy, expensive equipment.

Aye, but this machine does things other than play TLD. The last computer I bought was my old one in '16, and there was no way that thing was doing 4k without it becoming a slide show... and as Jeff said above, I started this thread after my very first time playing this game at 4K. Really, you have to see it to believe it; esp. wrt how good the trees look and how good very distant objects look.

I like video games, but I spend a lot more time working on my computers than I do playing games on them. If you think this is expensive, I'm currently speccing out a threadripper with four video cards in it to serve as a CI worker so we can validate my company's gpu-driven scientific numerical computation software on it as we develop it. I'm hoping to hold that down to under six thousand Canadian... but I suspect I'm going to end up between 6500-7000 bucks for it. Interestingly enough... even though it's going to have a gtx1070, an rtx2070, a 5600xt, and an rx580 in it (so we can test against the gtx, rtx, gcn, and navi video architectures) I'm not going to be installing any kind of a graphical interface on it at all; it's going to be strictly CLI on the console. I'm going threadripper because it has the bandwidth from the CPU to RAM, GPUs, and disk to ensure that we don't have the CI suite spending a lot of time waiting for I/O as we test each iteration of our gpu accelerated math project as it gets built.

(Side note for @jeffpeng: I'm getting the asrock trx40 creator mainboard because it comes with four PCIe4 x16 slots so it'll be able to feed all those video cards simultaneously without experiencing bus bottlenecks; the number of pci lanes that the new threadrippers support is staggering.)

Anyway, the main point is that I was exclaiming about just how insanely good this game looks when you do have the hardware to run it well at 4K... because it looks extremely good indeed. It's remarkable, and really shows that Raph and the Hinterland folks made the good decisions when they were figuring out their art resources etc. It's just phenomenally good.

[stratvox]

7 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

So, in short, everyone .... if you want a well balanced system that will blow you away for reasonable pricing and last at least one console generation..... buy @stratvox's PC - and at worst replace the GPU in 2 years if you feel like having (actual) ray tracing when it (actually) becomes relevant. Everything else is good for at least half a decade. If you have to cut corners ... cut with one of the NVMe drives, but personally I feel at least a PCIe Gen 3 SSD will become mandatory fast, and if you really have to save money, cut down the CPU, but no less than the 3700X, as everything below 8 cores will also become old real quick. Maybe wait for the B550 Motherboards if you want to save a buck, but don't miss out on PCIe 4.

Thanks for the kind words

Though chances are pretty good that I'm going to replace the video card with big navi when it comes out if, as its rumoured to do, it supports the Khronos vulkan/Microsoft dx12+ raytracing extensions with good performance. TLD is a game that would benefit insanely well from good raytracing; its lighting effects are already incredibly well-managed; I can just imagine how good it would look with raytracing. Like I said above, I hope the quiet from the developers is because they're moving to a newer version of unity that hopefully will support raytracing as raytracing starts to move into the consumer market.

And as a side note, I remember when I first learned what ray tracing was and how it worked; that was way back in the nineties in the Quake/Descent era. Seeing real time raytracing arrive 25 years later is something I anticipate with glee.

[Aurimas]

18 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

 I used to live in Münster, in which case I would have even inveted you over.... well, except right now that's not really an option

Where did you move?

3 hours ago, Hotzn said:

Because I have a job

Fair enough, I guess the only reason you would wanna build the PC yourself is if you want to have it as an accomplishment or know more about PC building.. but since you knew about it in your younger years, then I guess it's not the case.

[Guest jeffpeng]

2 hours ago, stratvox said:

(Side note for @jeffpeng: I'm getting the asrock trx40 creator mainboard because it comes with four PCIe4 x16 slots so it'll be able to feed all those video cards simultaneously without experiencing bus bottlenecks; the number of pci lanes that the new threadrippers support is staggering.)

Wow someone's bringing the big guns 😄 TRX40 is just amazing for that kind of stuff. My only real beef with it is the memory limit. But .... meh, well, I get it. Segmentation and stuff. Because - most people wouldn't believe it with a 5K CAD pricetag attached - it's staggeringly cheap for what it does. And yeah, that Asrock Creator checks pretty much all the boxes. It's a bit flimsy on the VRM side, but as long as you run the TR in spec it should be fine. I was pretty flabberglasted when I realised it's the only TRX40 board that supports quad-dualslot GPUs. Like ... I mean.... cmon, the platform basically screams rendering workstation.

2 hours ago, stratvox said:

it supports the Khronos vulkan/Microsoft dx12+ raytracing extensions with good performance

Yeah that's what I meant with "when (actual) raytracing becomes (actually) relevant" 😄 What might be interesting for your software: Navi 2X is supposed to be able to do INT8 by basically splitting the FP32 ALU into quadrants and running SIMD on them. Unless they put that behind a paywall (Quadro, anyone?) this is going to shake quite a few markets.

2 hours ago, stratvox said:

Seeing real time raytracing arrive 25 years later is something I anticipate with glee.

Just wait 25 more years, and we'll actually have actually pathtraced real time imagery 😉 I'll meet you here then ^^

1 hour ago, Aurimas said:

Where did you move?

Many places. I had a brief stay in Frankfurt (Main), an equally brief one in Neustrelitz, then Potsdam near Berlin, where I already used to live before in the early 2000's, and now I'm basically back "home" near Hannover, but actually still working a lot in Berlin, so I kinda "live" in two places at once. But of all the places I lived I liked Münster the best, I guess.

[bad94]

hey jeff & stratvox I really enjoyed reading your technical discussion and wish I knew a little more about sys admin stuff / computer architecture. Two questions which I have which are maybe off topic but I trust your opinions:

1) i use ubuntu daily for work but usually use windows to game and i have a dual boot on my laptop. I did once install the steam client on ubuntu. do you guys game using linux or windows?

2) Any suggestions for a gaming laptop? my current lap op only has an integrated video card and I would love to see the long dark in better shape haha. I dont play many video games...really only TLD and some other indie stuff with low requirements.

[Guest jeffpeng]

3 hours ago, bad94 said:

i use ubuntu daily for work but usually use windows to game and i have a dual boot on my laptop. I did once install the steam client on ubuntu. do you guys game using linux or windows?

Sadly, as much as it pains me: Windows. There is always the hassle, and while you can get most things to work somehow, the amount of time this consumes and keeps consuming with every other game update is just too much for me. Plus TLD on Linux is still broken afaik.

3 hours ago, bad94 said:

Any suggestions for a gaming laptop? my current lap op only has an integrated video card and I would love to see the long dark in better shape haha. I dont play many video games...really only TLD and some other indie stuff with low requirements.

Pretty much anything with an NVidia 1650 mobile or 1060 mobile should be fine to run the game at Full HD and 60fps at mostly full settings. There is also the AMD 5500M graphics chip, but I haven't seen that one in any laptop except for Macbooks - and there only in the most expensive ones. You COULD go with an integrated graphics chip with the new intel 10th gen processors that have a G at the end (like G7) or the better new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors, like the 4800U/H .... but you won't run Full HD at 60 with those. It's playable, but not amazing, and not pretty.

Another option is always to go with a Thunderbolt GPU if you are gaming only when at home. The enclosures for those, however, come at around 300 bucks, but you can actually get desktop level performance on a laptop with these. Pairing one of those with an AMD RX 580 or NVidia 1650 super, which can both be had for less than 200 bucks, would do the trick. So if you only game at home/at your desk and you are happy with your laptop otherwise that would be an option.

But then again .... for 500 bucks you can get a full PC you can stream from via Steam Play, even when not at home but having access to a good internet connection. A hide-in-the-closet-and-don't-expect-too-much-milage-from-it 1080p60 PC below 500 bucks would be this. Hook that up to a network, install steam on it, and you've achieved your own GeForce Now! .... kinda. Honestly .... considering that gaming laptops are ugly pieces of moosepoop, bulky and seriously expensive .... that's what I would do.

Edit: Hey - and the ultimate advantage of this: you can stream to your linux laptop from you windows gaming slave PC.

Edit2: Now that I think of it there should be headless network slaves prebuilt and preinstalled for this purpose. Brb founding a company xD Edit3: On second thought .... it fell flat for Valve, it would fall flat for me I guess ^^

Edited April 21, 2020 by jeffpeng

[bad94]

Thanks jeff for your very thoughtful response. You're an absolute legend 🤠🤠🤠

 

The thought of having a slave game pc that i can stream to anywhere is just friggin awesome. I will investigate