A laptop for ED in 2019

dm06

dm06
Old Duck said:
I'd like to spend no more than $1000 USD ($1200 top), and I want good HARDWARE.
Click to expand...
Old Duck said:
Please understand that I'm not buying a PC for the sole purpose of playing ED. That's why I'm focusing on a laptop rather than a giant box on the floor ATM. Portability is important. Now technically if it were a 'box' PC the size of an XB1X (ie - something portable that I can throw in my laptop case like I do my PS4 Slim), then I could probably work with that as well.
Click to expand...
I walked that path. And I can tell you following:
1. You can for sure forget about $1200 gaming laptop for ED. You may have a hope but you will not find that. This is especially true after last year update with better lighting - that increased game's hardware requirements. Before that I comfortably played with geforce 1050 laptop.
2. I strongly suggest you to reconsider your opinion about portability. Reasons for that is price you will pay: even without budget limit (laptops with top hardware are expensive) you can have same PC 3x cheaper.

Edit: considering this game development: new features first, optimization - never, I assume that new updates will require more hardware resources. So PCs which are good for now will become scrap after update. For the PC it can be solved by upgrading some parts (video, cpu, more memory). But that is not that easy for laptops.
 
Last edited:

Old Duck

Old Duck
Old Duck said:
Since I'm still in the "to buy or not to buy" phase, somebody sell me on the benefits of a laptop able to run in ultra-quality mode by posting some ultra-quality screenshots in this thread. I'm particularly interested in lighting, shadows, texture detail, asset LOD at a distance, and planetary surface LOD. Oh, and aliasing. They don't need to be 1080p native captures (I'm on a 720p laptop right now).
Click to expand...

BTW, a couple of specific links to existing screenshots in the designated thread would be fine. I just don't know what the graphics settings are for each of these vast array of images already in existence.
 

Red_Beard_98

R

The Official Explorers Photography Thread.

Thank you! I looked through the EDSM data and this might actually be it, body C6 has large gap in it's rings. The only thing that worries me is that on the screenshots the ring looks like it is illuminated by something blue and the system has only yellow and red stars. Still Byeia Eurk ZC-S c5-9...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

The Official Explorers Photography Thread.

Thank you! I looked through the EDSM data and this might actually be it, body C6 has large gap in it's rings. The only thing that worries me is that on the screenshots the ring looks like it is illuminated by something blue and the system has only yellow and red stars. Still Byeia Eurk ZC-S c5-9...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

2 of my posts in the explorers photography thread. These are just the screenshots uploaded directly to my steam account. I have HQ versions saved locally on my PC but they are somewhere around 6mb each which I think is too big to upload to the forums, plus I'm at work and don't have access to the originals right now.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Somebody should loan me their gaming PC for a week so I can play with all the graphics settings and see what they all do, LOL.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Pay the shipping and I'll send you my gaming laptop to play with.... It only weighs a kilo or 2, despite being a beast :)
(and the return shipping of course £2,000 laptop)
 

Morbad

Morbad
Old Duck said:
BTW, a couple of specific links to existing screenshots in the designated thread would be fine. I just don't know what the graphics settings are for each of these vast array of images already in existence.
Click to expand...

If you have any specific requests, either of screen shot subject, or settings, I can probably show you.

What I had on hand, all thoroughly destroyed by the jpeg compression required to make them fit on imgur without too much molestation, in no particular order:

Pr8zFUp.jpg


FXbYEFT.jpg


gT7xuE3.jpg


povQA13.jpg


0kDpwDp.jpg


9xXxwNL.jpg


ULjqUux.jpg


DChCpte.jpg


PCrr4rm.jpg


All 4k, custom ultra settings, with 16x AF and high-quality texture filtering forced through the drivers. None of these were captured with the high-quality capture mode, mostly because it doesn't work in Open (too much client load) and my CMDR doesn't leave Open.

The custom part of the ultra settings involves: maxing out the terrain work slider, disabling DoF and enabling SMAA; slightly reduced bloom intensity; increased planet texture (8k), environment map (1k), and galaxy background/skybox resolution (3328); tuned nebula texture dimensions (doubled) and sample counts (reduced to the threshold of diminishing returns); increased star (tripled) and milky way instance (doubled, but with reduced size) counts, plus a few other things.

I also replaced the entire ultra quality shadow cascade tables with my own, which is detailed in the thread for that.

Obviously, you won't be playing at 4k on a thousand dollar laptop this year, but everything except the main render resolution should work fine on a mobile 1660 Ti 6GiB equivalent and rarely dip below 60fps.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Very nice! And I'm assuming shadows don't flash or flicker, either. What about shadow LOD / visibility pop-in? When I'm flying over a planet surface at altitude on PS4, I'll see a crater at some distance that either has a shadow that disappears or no shadow that appears as I approach it. This is particularly jarring when I approach certain ports and sunset / sunrise, as they may be fully illuminated by the sun when I exit glide, only to be "swallowed" (the shadows grow like Vashta Nerada) as I approach to land... I don't remember this in the early days of ED on PS4, so I'm guessing it's one of the settings that got nerfed.

Also, do your ship / SRV lights cast dynamic shadows? Some fellow was going on about this in the early days of ED on PS4 as if they once did on the Pro and then later didn't. It would indeed add ambiance to exploring old Generation Ships and whatnot as I slowly drift by with my headlights casting moving shadows over a darken and dead ship.

And the last question is LOD-pop, which is severe on PS4 at silly-close distances. Panning the external camera around my ship causes all sorts of "parts" to dramatically change and "pop", which is greatly annoying. It's no just my ship, but this is the most obvious example of a reproducible 'ugly' LOD transition.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Old Duck said:
Very nice! And I'm assuming shadows don't flash or flicker, either.
Click to expand...

Mostly eliminated, but still a few isolated cases of this as it's hard to balance depth biases to remove all shadow acne without causing peter panning. I think I've got a pretty solid compromise between the two.

Old Duck said:
What about shadow LOD / visibility pop-in? When I'm flying over a planet surface at altitude on PS4, I'll see a crater at some distance that either has a shadow that disappears or no shadow that appears as I approach it. This is particularly jarring when I approach certain ports and sunset / sunrise, as they may be fully illuminated by the sun when I exit glide, only to be "swallowed" (the shadows grow like Vashta Nerada) as I approach to land... I don't remember this in the early days of ED on PS4, so I'm guessing it's one of the settings that got nerfed.
Click to expand...

This still happens to a degree as the 'baked in' shadows have a range of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, but the cascaded shadow maps can only reasonably be made to stretch out to 10-12 without a prohibitive number of them. I've tried to extend them as far as practical and fade them as best as I can, but it can still be jarring in certain circumstances. It's a lot better than the default ultra, however.

Old Duck said:
Also, do your ship / SRV lights cast dynamic shadows?
Click to expand...

Yes.

Old Duck said:
And the last question is LOD-pop, which is severe on PS4 at silly-close distances. Panning the external camera around my ship causes all sorts of "parts" to dramatically change and "pop", which is greatly annoying. It's no just my ship, but this is the most obvious example of a reproducible 'ugly' LOD transition.
Click to expand...

LOD pop in exists on PC and is noticeable, but is only bad (with the distance maxed out) around station exteriors, namely the trench between the segments of Coriolis starports. In most other cases the transitions are quite acceptable.

I'll take some more screenshots and a video or two to show the issues I still find later.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
dm06 said:
I walked that path. And I can tell you following:
1. You can for sure forget about $1200 gaming laptop for ED. You may have a hope but you will not find that. This is especially true after last year update with better lighting - that increased game's hardware requirements. Before that I comfortably played with geforce 1050 laptop.
2. I strongly suggest you to reconsider your opinion about portability. Reasons for that is price you will pay: even without budget limit (laptops with top hardware are expensive) you can have same PC 3x cheaper.
Click to expand...
I just want to restate my OP - I'm not buying a PC to game, I may be buying a new laptop for "business and pleasure", and if the price is right and I get the influx of cash I'm hoping for, then I'm willing to pay a little extra for a laptop that can play ED comfortably. I'll still be using my console(s) for the majority of my other games.

The irony is I'm satisfied with my PS4 Slim for most of the games I play, so I'm not a top-of-the-line graphics snob. It's just that ED looks so spectacularly horrendous on PS4 at times that I am looking for some alternatives. I have a thread similar to this one on the XBox forum about the XB1X, just in case that infusion of cash doesn't happen this year.
 
Last edited:

varonica

varonica
MickyG1982 said:
The GTX 1050 will not do Ultra at 60fps, at least mine won't (2 gb model) at least not unless you drop the resolution to 720p, but then that was the same for my old GTX 960 / AMD 860K based desktop too. As a half decent compromise I tend to play at 900p to allow for some of the bells & whistles and a decent framerate, on a small screen that is just fine however.
Click to expand...

I have the RTX2070 in my laptop, Ultra everything, min 100fps up to 144fps, but that's only because the LCD is 144hz IPS display, I expect it will go higher. The budget is a bit tight for a RTX2070 though, cutting down in other areas may help, I have a 500gb SSD and 1tb standard hard drive and 16gb ram, so you could save a bit by cutting down the specs in that area, but if you could manage it in budget going for the RTX2000 series and cutting down in other areas is the way to go.

I can see similar specs with a RTX 2060 for just over the suggested budget locally which would probably do 60fps easily, only 8gb ram and just the SSD, but of course that's local to me. I upgraded from a laptop with a 970m and this setup just blows it away. If you can squeeze the budget and get at least the RTX2060 you won't regret it.
 

Morbad

Morbad
@Old Duck

Some of the LOD, shadow, and atmospheric transitions when approaching planet surfaces:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FYc4PnnQJY


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmlIRDkF0QY


The LOD for building and other large surface objects can be quite jarring and there really nothing that can be done about this. Tuning the shadow cascades won't help as objects that aren't yet rendered can't cast dynamic shadows. Planets with volcanism also have a haze that changes tint as one drops out of SC and glide...not much that can be done about that either.

On the positive side, most of the really jarring shadow only transitions can be smoothed out, and most shadow artifacts can be significantly mitigated with minimal performance cost. With my custom settings I still see some Peter Panning issues when surface objects are lit from extremely shallow angles (the DBX has very low mounted headlights), but there is almost no flicker/shadow acne. There are also clearly dynamic shadows being cast by ship/SRV lamps on the PC, even in the presence of other light sources.

zFlkpQn.jpg


Also, some older comparisons between the standard ultra preset and an older version of custom shadow tables I made while over in Colonia:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge1aDqG6TGM


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejo4om4hRp0
 

Gruntznphartz

Gruntznphartz
Hi, I'm new to the forums.

I'm playing on a HP ENVY Laptop 17-ae0xx
Intel Core i7-7500 @ 2.7GHz (7th Gen)
8 GB RAM
Which comes equipped with an NVIDEA GeForce 940MX

Most of the game graphics setting are on High. The rest are on Medium

The game plays well, it's very fluid. The only thing that I've noticed that's a little disconcerting, is that occasionally, on first sighting a planet, it will 'fill in' in four separate quadrants. Once it's done that the image remains perfect. In 250 hours of playing I've only noticed it about 5 or 6 times.

Hope this is helpful.
Good luck with your choice.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
I just watched the videos and was struck by the apparent fact that LOW quality shadows on PC are still way better than the shimmering mess we have on PS4. Here's a link to a video I uploaded some time ago, similar to your base flyover but on PS4:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpNjYnviL6I


Once you follow that link, you'll see other videos on my channel documenting just how dreadful PS4* shadows are. They are actually worse now than they were when I posted these, because the new lighting system just amplifies their terribleness.

* EDIT - I should say "ED on PS4", as it's the only game that looks this way on my Slim. Shadows are good if not amazing in many of my other games, including dated games like Skyrim which surprisingly supports multiple shadow-casting light sources.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom