Surprisingly Good Performance On A Laptop

[EngineRoom 205]

A day or two ago I dug out my laptop which had been languishing unused since I came home from sea last October. I did a reformat and reinstall of Windows 8.1 and thought I'd give XP10 a try.

 

The laptop is an MSI GT680R with an i7-2630QM @2Ghz, 8GB RAM and a GTX460M graphics card pushing a 1920x1080 display. I'm running XP10.25 with the HD Mesh V2, OSM Europe, SkyMaxx1.2 and most graphics options turned up to one notch from max along with FXAA. Not only does XP10 look really really nice, but it's also running surprisingly well. Flying over an OSM heavy city in a Carenado with decent cloud cover I'm getting about 17-18fps, but at higher altitudes and away from heavy scenery areas I'm getting well over 30fps.

 

I know that doesn't sound like much compared to the kind of framerates most people are usually chasing, but when you consider I'm getting this without the stutters or blurry textures I would be getting in FSX I'm actually very impressed.

 

Not bad at all for a 2 1/2 year old 15" laptop!

[HiFlyer 9,376]

Surprised you are apparently doing that well with a Cpu at 2ghz. Gratz!.

[deetee 164]

I am PC-less at the moment and am running FSX on a Dell Latitude laptop.

Amazed that it runs surprisingly smoothly on medium settings, although AA does somewhat kill the Intel 4000 gpu.

[EngineRoom 205]

I must admit I am very surprised at how well it runs. Multiple overcast cloud layers will kill the performance, in which case I switch SkyMaxx Pro to the lowest detail overcast which brings the performance back. I was doing some circuit work at Manston EGMH last night with the 777 and 757, moderate cloud cover, 30nm visibility and HD Mesh v2, and was getting 20fps. Not a massive framerate by any means, but still perfectly smooth and flyable.

 

It is a very, very good laptop, probably the best I've ever had. It runs stuff like Rise of Flight, DCS on high detail settings very well indeed, and even the new IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad Alpha if I switch the textures to medium (which still look very good). It starts to chug if I throw FSX with lots of Orbx scenery and aircraft like the Flight 1 Citation Mustang, but then I think the same would be true for any system. The only problem I've had with it was having to get a new mains power jack fitted after the old one came loose last year. It's a far cry from the very expensive Alienware laptop I had back in 2008 which would overheat and had pretty poor build quality (the hinges on the screen and surrounding bezel started to come apart after less than a year).

[rojantrojan 17]

I do all of my X-plane simming these days on a MSI GT70-20D Gaming laptop. I have always built desktop PC's in the past (specifically for flight simming) so was very hesitant buying an off-the-shelf PC, which I haven't done for many,many years. But after the wife and I had our little boy, gone were the days that I could shut myself in my man-cave and flight sim for a couple of hours while the wife was away with friends, I had to be mobile somehow (so I was free to change nappies at a moments notice :lol: ) So here I am with a laptop (not sure why they call it that with the size of them these days) and I've been very pleasantly surprised by the performance of X-plane 10 on it, or any other game for that matter, or any programme to be fair. I'm not saying it could fully replace a desktop PC, given the cost per performance ratio, you could build a PC for the fraction of the price to be honest, but I'm very surprised how well it holds up for flight simming. DCS World works great too. Unfortunately though, cpu-bound FSX doesn't perform so great, which is real shame with all my add-ons etc. Kind of new that was going to be the case though.

 

Rhydian

[EngineRoom 205]

I've worked at sea for the last ten years now so a laptop has been my only choice. I did buy a high end desktop in 2010 but to be honest I've never got my money's worth out of it as I'm away from home so much. I've been through quite a few high end laptops, good and bad. I'm most impressed with the MSI range of gaming laptops, they really pack quite a punch and don't cost as much as an Alienware. The MSI build quality is also pretty good, definitely better than my Alienware experience!

 

You're right, FSX can bring any laptop to its knees, but then again it can do the same to any desktop! I've found if I'm just a little more conservative than I might be on the desktop with stuff like autogen and anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering (mitigated a great deal by the smaller 15" screen on my laptop versus the much larger 27" screen on my desktop) and stay away from the really heavy addon aircraft or scenery I can actually get FSX to run very nice on my laptop. Even P3Dv2 runs pretty well. FS9 as you can imagine just flies along without even breaking a sweat. I was most surprised that I could get X-Plane looking so good and still manage flyable framerates.