
If you’re trying to play The Witcher III on a laptop at the minimum specifications, it simply won’t be as immersive as it would be on a gaming PC with the right hardware for the job. If you don’t want to sacrifice, get a gaming PCĪs much as gaming on non-gaming hardware is great and a perfectly viable way to enjoy some of your favourite games, they can’t give you the whole experience. It won’t make the game look great, but if you’re going head to head against someone, having a faster game can help you play faster too, and that can make all the difference. To improve that you’ll want to turn off any advanced visual effects, especially motion blur, and turn shadow and texture quality to low. If you’re playing something more fast-paced or competitive, frames per second are arguably more important than visual quality. While that latter option is a necessity if you see lots of screen-tearing, it too can really sap your system’s resources so it’s one to only use if you really need to.

We would caution to stay away from effects like anti-aliasing, which can be very resource-intensive, and vertical sync or V-Sync. Do keep your FPS in mind though, as you don’t want to dip below 30 as an average or the game will start to feel very choppy. Things like view distance, texture quality, post-processing effects, and foliage levels can all make a game look much prettier. If you are playing a slower-paced game with beautiful vistas, you can afford to turn on more graphics options and run the game at closer to your laptop’s native resolution. Tweaking in-game settings can also make a big difference in how a game looks and performs. UserBenchmark is a great website to work out your potential FPS in popular games. You don’t have to break the bank to begin your gaming experience. Don’t Starve is a quirky survival game with a unique style FTL: Faster than Light is a challenging spaceship management action game Into the Breach is a chess-like game from the same developer as FTL, and this writer managed to get the always-punishing Darkest Dungeon running on a four-year-old, entry-level laptop with little difficulty.Įven our cheapest laptop, the Chillblast Prestige, with the base i5 processor, can average 60fps in Counter Strike at low settings. Outside the realm of AAA games and esports games, there are some gorgeous independent games that look beautiful and run really well without a hefty graphics processor behind them. Other popular games that are more than playable with onboard graphics include Counter Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, DotA 2, Rocket League and the Half Life series. Hearthstone is a fantastic living card game also from Blizzard, and its specifications are even lower than that of Overwatch. If you can’t quite afford a laptop with that sort of hardware or you’re not an FPS fan, don’t fret, there are plenty of other options out there. There’s still a lot of games to choose from… Any new Intel laptop with a Core i3, or Core i5 CPU will be far more capable than that and will easily play Overwatch at low settings. Blizzard’s incredibly popular hero-based FPS, Overwatch, requires just an Intel HD 4400 GPU – a graphics core found in some laptops that are upwards of five years old. That opens up a world of gaming potential if you stick to indie games, esports titles, or older AAAs.

But as long as the laptop you’re looking to buy has a relatively recent Intel processor or one of AMD’s new APUs (Accelerated Processing Unit), then the onboard graphics can be surprisingly capable without a dedicated chip. That’s what gives them the extra muscle to render pretty games at higher resolutions and faster frame rates. One thing that gaming laptops and gaming desktops usually have in common, is the inclusion of a dedicated graphics chip or card. NFL footage © NFL Productions LLC.Onboard graphics can do more than you think All other NFL-related trademarks are trademarks of the National Football League. NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League.The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated.
