System Req Question

[BrigandPhantos77]

So I haven't tried X4 since just after it was released on Steam. I initially tried it on a Nividium GTX 745 graphics card which seemed to handle it fine at lower settings. But that was in a Desktop PC. What I want to know is if it plays well on a laptop version GPU of the Nividia GeForce 3060 GPU? Keep in mind this is a Laptop and I know laptops generally need more resources than a desktop counterpart.

Laptop: MSI Katana
16 MB System Ram
GPU is GeForce 3060 (6 GB video ram) > GeForce RTX™ 3060 Laptop GPU 6GB GDDR6

I'm basically looking for recommended settings and whether or not anyone has experience with this graphics card. "Will it run the game well?"

[Imperial Good]

Since it in a dedicated GPU and has 6 GB of VRAM and is modern, X4 should run pretty well from the GPU perspective.

Settings wise being a laptop you will likely need to make some quality sacrifices, if even just for better thermals. X4 will likely be prone to bottlenecking on the CPU side of the laptop more than the GPU side, so you want to make sure that the dedicated GPU does not throttle the CPU by excessively consuming its thermal or power budget. Due to the nature of laptops being so different from each other this will likely require some experimentation to find a good combination of settings.

My recommendation would be to save on the more demanding effects. For example setting screen space or volumetric effects to low might save significant GPU power. Not all quality needs to be sacrificed, some like textures can probably be maxed out. You can probably get away with some AA, although choose a medium quality one since the high quality AAs are very resource intensive. If the laptop uses a 4k display you might need to sacrifice all AA, or choose a lower resolution and rely on FSR to do some upscaling.

As long as graphic settings are kept reasonable any performance issues will likely be due to the CPU.

[BrigandPhantos77]

The processor in it is> 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz

With being over clocked it runs easily at 3.5 without much issues. It also has 16 GB ram.

The downside with the device I have, is the battery can't keep up with the video card, so it has to be plugged in at all times for game-play. (Not really an issue to me.)

I run X3 with little problems on max settings. I guess the best choice then is to play around with the settings and to see how it performs.

Thanks!

[Alan Phipps]

I'll move this over to Off Topic which is the usual place for hardware discussions rather than in Tech Sp.