Other popular services include Nvidia's GeForce Now, which lets you stream the games you already own, and Amazon Luna. Our favorite option here is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which includes Microsoft's Cloud Gaming feature, because of its reliability and options to play Game Pass titles on PC and mobile. The service will essentially run the game using high-end hardware at a remote site, then stream the feed right to your low-end laptop. If you are blessed with fat internet pipes and tons of additional bandwidth, but don’t have the hardware to run games locally, consider game streaming as a potential solution. Stream Games Over the Internet Nvidia GeForce Now It also includes a launcher and deals hub, so your mileage may vary in terms of functionality, but it’s worth investigating as a one-stop performance booster. Razer Cortex deploys AI to tune your system for maximum performance, primarily by killing unnecessary background processes, fine-tuning settings, and clearing up storage space. Razer also has a software answer for struggling machines, though it comes with a fairly obtrusive marketing element. It’s a great way to squeeze some extra frames out of an old laptop without spending a dime. AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 2.0) renders games at lower resolution and then upscales them at a much lower GPU/CPU cost than natively rendering at higher resolutions. If you happen to own one of these cards-even the slimmer Max-Q laptop version-you should absolutely take advantage. ![]() Nvidia offers DLSS on supported (RTX) cards. In fact, some of them are so effective it feels almost like cheating. This effort has led to some incredible software innovations to help solve for potential performance issues. Nvidia and AMD are constantly striving to make more games accessible on their hardware. Take Advantage of Software Solutions PC games that support DLSS If you have any questions about whether a game will run on low-end hardware, Reddit's /r/lowendgaming subreddit is a good resource to learn from other gamers' experience. For a game like Civilization VI, this can mean lowering the size of the game world or reducing AI difficulty, which will put less strain on your CPU during the opponent’s turn. Instead of tuning graphics settings, try changing gameplay or difficulty settings to more hardware-friendly options. If you play more processor-intensive games, like simulation and world-building games, there are other settings to change. Some settings will require you to restart the game to alter them, so I recommend starting there. Grab an FPS tracker, like FRAPS, and tinker with in-game settings one by one, then jump to a representative part of the game or run an in-game benchmark. In the end, if running a game at 720p is what it takes to reach a playable framerate, that's what you have to do. Other major performance hogs includes ray tracing (especially intensive techniques like global illumination), draw distance, anti-aliasing, shadow detail, and texture quality. The performance impact of individual settings will vary from game to game, depending on optimization, the resources a game leans on most heavily, and how various effects (like lighting) are handled by the game’s engine. The biggest gains will be had from dropping resolution and the global quality setting. You will be surprised how many games will run below their minimum requirements, as long as you are willing to give up graphical fidelity. ![]() The most impactful action you can take to improve performance on older gear is to play with your in-game settings. That said, one of the nice things about laptops is that smaller screen size means you can often get away with lower resolutions and lower-quality settings, meaning less load on your hardware without a noticeable hit to fidelity. The sad reality is old hardware means compromises, so go in knowing that you are not going to have the best possible experience with most games, and many resource-intensive titles won't be playable at all. Set Your ExpectationsĪ quick disclaimer: If your laptop is on the brink of aging out of relevance completely, you will not be able to run Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra with ray tracing enabled. Here are a few strategies that can help you start gaming without needing to invest in an expensive setup. Pixel-graphic indies should not be a problem, though you may have to make sacrifices when it comes to graphics-intensive AAA titles. Even if you're hacking away at an ancient laptop, it doesn't mean you can't play games.
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