Hey all, I'm looking at getting a gaming laptop which could be able to run TS2020 easily. Does anyone currently play this on a laptop? If so, which laptop? Any recommendations welcome Thank you
Hi Tay... Yes, I play TS on a MSI GE63 8RE Raider... Had it about 9 months although it's a discontinued model now!!! Don't have any particular issues with it other than it runs a little warm (well known "fault" on this laptop) and the usual TS issues (but not as far as I'm aware any fault of the laprop)... Can't make any specific recommendations as it's all down to personal choice and of course, how much ££££££££ you have to throw into it!!! We had quite a limited budget but still ended up paying around £800 for it (it was £1200 when we first started looking for a new laptop) and it basically became a shared xmas present with the Mrs...!!! Eric
There are a couple of caveats. First if you've read the small print you'll note that Dovetail doesn't guarantee TS will run on mobile versions of GPUs though this is covering their backs against the limitations of mobile chipsets especially when TS was first released in days of yore- you would be unfortunate indeed to find one that didn't work. Secondly you'll always pay more for less buying a laptop but again I expect you know that. Makes and models seem to change every week so recommending you look for a particular one could just be frustrating- based on my experience Acer machines are to be avoided but that was probably just my bad luck. That turnover of models might be exploited- instead of getting the latest thing look for the model it's replacing because the last batch is likely to be getting sold off at a discount. You could also consider buying second hand- some die-hard gamer might be getting rid of his laptop because it's 18 months old and won't run Call of Modern Warfare Raider at 240fps but it'll be great for TS. You want the same things you'd look for in a desktop machine and TS, being an older program, isn't actually that demanding. A decent CPU (at least an i3 or Ryzen 3 preferably i5/Ryzen 5- extra cores won't help TS directly but it will let the system work more smoothly in the background), a GPU (anything will be better than integrated graphics and to put it crudely the higher the number the better but TS, again because of its age, won't exploit it particularly well so don't go overboard), plenty of RAM (at least 8GB) and storage (the faster the better. As to size... pick a number- my system has a 240GB boot drive and I wish I'd got a bigger one. How big is your current TS installation and what else do you want to use the system for?) Edit: A good keyboard with a numeric keypad would be desirable- some trains use keypad keys for some functions and clarting about trying to remember how to use laptop model specific modifier keys when you've got two seconds to cancel a driver vigilance alarm could get old pretty quickly.
TrainSim-Matt uses a Laptop when he is doing the TSW2 driving sessions on Twitch. He did mention what it was on a recent Bakerloo line run but I did not write it down
I run off a laptop and external thunderbolt 3 GPU (A Razer Core X with AMD RX570). Despite only having a dual core i5 7360U running at a lowly 2.3ghz, I never seem to see the same "tile loading stutter" that others seem to have and that I see on streams, despite running at 1440p - when it drops down, it drops to around the 20-25fps rather than turning into a slideshow. I sometimes wonder how much of people's performance problems may down to the type of storage people have - my laptop uses a very fast NVMe SSD, and I -suspect- this is why my otherwise low-ish-end laptop processor and external GPU is able to do so well. Could other more knowledgeable and experienced on the subject chime in? How important is storage performace to TS1's overall performance?
I use a laptop as I prefer the flexibility they offer over a desktop. There are plenty of good points raised above which I'd fully agree with - particularly the SSD, RAM and numpad provision (many laptops lack the latter). I personally opted for an Acer Predator Triton 300. Money ultimately decides which specs you opt for, but I chose a 1TB SSD, i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and 8GB NVIDIA RTX 2070 graphics card. Those specs are probably somewhat higher than you'll really need for Train Simulator to be honest, however I play other games too and thought if nothing else it gives me a bit of extra future proofing (and has spare slots for further upgrades if ever needed).
I was looking at an i7 10750H 2.9ghz 5ghz boosted with a 1660ti 6mb card, only 8gb RAM. Would I be looking at big compromises on settings to reach a decent framerate?
You might wish you had more RAM for other programs if not TS- before I got my current system I was running it quite happily on a laptop with 6GB. As to frame rate what screen resolution are you looking at? I see some slow down when things get busy on my (desktop) 1660ti but nothing objectionable and that's at QHD (2560x1440).
wow I took the risk and bought the new Acer Nitro 5, i7 10950, GTX 1660ti 6 GB, 8 GB RAM 512GG SSD. Its blisteringly fast compared to Xbox, runs at 1080P Maxed out settings at 60FPS no stutter. At the moment this PC reduced to £899 at Argos
Great that you've got such good results and paid well under a grand! Argos, of all places... just goes to show you don't need some custom-built thing! Would you be able to post your game display settings in TS1 [edit: oh wait, you said maxed out settings, sorry], and which routes/consists you're getting those results for, so people can learn more about how your settings and computer setup affect performance? It'd be really great if you could post some disk performance benchmarks (such as Black Magic's disk speed test) too.