10 GAMING LAPTOPS TESTED
+ HOW TO KEEP YOURS RUNNING PERFECTLY
“Nvidia’s GeForce Experience features a good performance optimization tool.”
Most games attempt to automatically set your graphics settings. This may take the form of a ‘auto-detect’ or it may set the quality to the likes of ‘low’, ‘high’ or ‘ultra’ etc. A hardcore gamer will prob-ably end up tweaking the individual settings manually, but for the less experienced user, there are plenty of ways to optimize a specific game to run as well as it can on your system.
Many users will consider Nvidia’s Geforce experience and AMD’s Gaming Evolved apps to be unnecessary bloatware, but they do have pretty decent game optimisation tools. These apps will show the officially supported games, however, you can manually add them as well. After pressing Optimize in the Nvidia or AMD tools, you’ll be able to see difference between your current game settings compared against and the ones Nvidia or AMD recommend as optimal. There’s also sliders in both apps that lets you adjust your settings for performance or quality.
‘Can it play Crysis?’ is a meme that continues to this day. The same concept applies to many newer highly intensive games. While the goal is always to game at the highest resolution and settings, of course this is not going to be possible. Eye candy should be regarded as secondary to actual quality game play. If you’re busy engaging enemies or trying to trim a tenth off of a lap time, are you really going to notice a slightly lower graphical detail or a tree with a few less pixels? Probably not, so don’t be afraid to lower settings a notch or two if it helps you to achieve a smooth gaming experience. You want to be immersed in your gameplay, not distracted by annoying FPS drops.
Some settings are particularly resource hungry. If you’re struggling a bit to maintain a decent FPS level, disabling some of the taxing options like MSAA, supersampling , draw distance or vendor specific settings like Nvidia’s Hairworks. This can deliver substantial performance increases depending on the game.
Nvidia’s Geforce Experience application comes with an optional battery boost setting. For example, if your game typically runs at something like 60-90 FPS, you can lower it to 30 or 40 FPS which takes a lot of the load off of the GPU, prolonging battery life. While battery boost can produce some significant improvements in the range of 50%+ in some circumstances, you’re always better off plugged in wherever possible.
Don’t forget, if adjusting your graphical detail levels still delivers sub optimal gameplay, you can always drop the resolution a notch. You’ll get a nice FPS jump.