RoG, Mixed Feelings, and Star Citizen

[Northforge]

1.5 years after purchasing a G74SXDH72 and looking back I would honestly say that this laptop is satisfactory, as I've been able to play all the games I wanted. I do have regrets though: I should have listened to the articles I read around the time of purchase that the integrated NVidia GTX 560M was over hyped. While it's true I was able to play any games I wanted, the optimal settings for what I was playing were always minimal or medium at best. I have no idea and still to this day, why games like Skyrim and others set my shadows and such to Ultra when the FPS hit is so great. "Golly, FPS 15-20, but it looks GREAT!!"

Countless hours of research and conflicting articles stating which partition or drive a game needed to be on, fending through articles of myths for pagefile allocation, ssd myths, and matching all community tested benchmarks for this laptop, I've come to one conclusion: Nvidia GTX 560M is a garbage card for a "gamer" on a "gaming laptop" in 2012-2013, and the disparity between the PC equivalent is so very brutal.

Star Citizen is coming. A game where it's creators have basically outlined that, while it's well known that games have been pushing the graphics card world more and more and has been a worthwhile mission, Star Citizen will do the same, but will make them sh*! themselves first.

So, my goal is to use the G750JH as a benchmark, outline optimal partitioning, identify the typical "to-do" list of tweaks, game directory, pagefile stuff, and then wait ... for the next Asus series that hosts something like a titan card. I'm tellin you, I want to be able to see a solid FPS in Star Citizen of 150+. For what we pay for these laptops already, it's NOT a ridiculous expectation. No, it's not, because there's no reason why a G74SXDH72's NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560M performs at 56% of it's GTX560 PC counterpart and costs way more, and I want to know if the G750JH's NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM will disappoint as well.

Theorycrafting: "Can it be done?"
Game: Star Citizen (hangar module)
Goal: FPS 150+ solid
System: Asus G750JH (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM)

How?: ____ :confused:

[X-ROG]

For starters: GPU branding is not decided by us, so what Nvidia calls a GTX 560M is up to Nvidia. To fit all that technology in a tiny area will always, always have compromises. We have to choose what will fit the budget/TDP/expected price. True, the 780M is the most powerful mobile card on the market, but it has 1356 CUDA cores to the GTX 780s 2304. Yet 1356 is still nearly 10x more powerful than the 192 in your 560M though. (For reference, the 580M only had 384 cores anyway, but was 2x the TDP and more than 2x the price).

I've no idea the requirements for Star Citizen, but look for performance reviews that feature the GTX 660 Ti - it should be *around* this value, but you'll pairing it with a slower CPU than desktop (again, 35W laptop versus 95-130W desktop) so performance won't be as high. Also remember you'll only get max performance when plugged in. This is built into the drivers to protect NB batteries from overcurrent draw.

The next question is: do you really need a laptop? What can, say, a mini-ITX PC offer you versus laptop, for example?

[Zeruel]

Northforge wrote:
1.5 years after purchasing a G74SXDH72 and looking back I would honestly say that this laptop is satisfactory, as I've been able to play all the games I wanted. I do have regrets though: I should have listened to the articles I read around the time of purchase that the integrated NVidia GTX 560M was over hyped. While it's true I was able to play any games I wanted, the optimal settings for what I was playing were always minimal or medium at best. I have no idea and still to this day, why games like Skyrim and others set my shadows and such to Ultra when the FPS hit is so great. "Golly, FPS 15-20, but it looks GREAT!!"

Countless hours of research and conflicting articles stating which partition or drive a game needed to be on, fending through articles of myths for pagefile allocation, ssd myths, and matching all community tested benchmarks for this laptop, I've come to one conclusion: Nvidia GTX 560M is a garbage card for a "gamer" on a "gaming laptop" in 2012-2013, and the disparity between the PC equivalent is so very brutal.

Star Citizen is coming. A game where it's creators have basically outlined that, while it's well known that games have been pushing the graphics card world more and more and has been a worthwhile mission, Star Citizen will do the same, but will make them sh*! themselves first.

So, my goal is to use the G750JH as a benchmark, outline optimal partitioning, identify the typical "to-do" list of tweaks, game directory, pagefile stuff, and then wait ... for the next Asus series that hosts something like a titan card. I'm tellin you, I want to be able to see a solid FPS in Star Citizen of 150+. For what we pay for these laptops already, it's NOT a ridiculous expectation. No, it's not, because there's no reason why a G74SXDH72's NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560M performs at 56% of it's GTX560 PC counterpart and costs way more, and I want to know if the G750JH's NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM will disappoint as well.

Theorycrafting: "Can it be done?"
Game: Star Citizen (hangar module)
Goal: FPS 150+ solid
System: Asus G750JH (NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM)

How?: ____ :confused:

You're not going to get good performance on a labtop for Star Citizen. That game is going to replace Crysis in terms of benchmarking and being that game that destroys graphics cards.

I suggest you invest in a ATX tower. Not sure if you want 150fps ULTRA, thats crazy. You will need to SLI gtx 880s to do that. 150 low settingsmaybe, on a laptop....never.

[Petosiris]

Hi @Northforge,

This thread is old but I was interested in how you did with the laptop issue.  I guess you don't have the same PC today. Are you still playing Star Citizen (Alpha)?

I've found that a desktop PC is needed for games like Star Citizen.  It's also cheaper, in most cases, and you can tailor it to your needs and wishes.  Plus it's easier to replace old parts, like graphic cards.  I tend to choose desktops also because I can't afford to buy a laptop and then buy a new laptop a few years later.  So I buy desktop parts, sometime collecting for years, buying MB + RAM + GPU + Disks until last, until I have all parts I need to build it.

As for Star Citizen, you don't get 150+ FPS there today either. It's still unfinished and especially unoptimized. They're working on it though.  The game is already utilizing more than 1 core in your CPU.  I think it's upto 6 cores ATM, if it's available, and that's only the beginning.  They're transitioning from Direct X (they'll keep support for Direct X a while though) to the latest Vulkan, which will probably give a nice boost in performance and also allow them to build a Linux version later.  After implementing Vulkan support they're going to utilize GPUs better, which will boost performance for those with modern GPUs.  In addition, they're working on Server Meshing, which will allow many more player in the same area at the same time and also optimize the server usage better.

I think all these optimizations will significantly boost performance on the client PC, but it'll always be a demanding game when it comes to GPU, RAM, CPU and SSD.  Therefore I'm aiming at top parts there.  I'll also use a 64 GB RAM cache (half of my RAM) to cache the fast SSD I've dedicated for games.  There are a lot of asset loading and RAM usage in Star Citizen and my theory is that lots of RAM and software like PrimoCache will help, if the cache is large enough.

Happy Easter!  😊