And then, 333 days later…

Oh man, almost a year since my previous post. In my defense, things have been quite hectic in the past eleven months. Lots of stuff happened, and I’m now looking at a complete change of life within the next three months. That’s quite something, and more than I could have hoped for even just a year ago. I consider myself lucky overall. Of course, luck only comes to those who made the effort to call for it. Best not forget that. People too often tend to minimize their own achievements.

Maybe not quite as severe a change of life as being resurrected as a wraith to enact vengeance on your old master and executioner. But… almost there.

I guess I don’t have much to say this time, I just wanted to update the blog. But now I’m here, might as well find something to say. So, for example, due to having to move around, I’ve become the owner of an Acer Swift X with Ryzen 5500U and GTX 1650. It… isn’t a great combo. The Ryzen is a little too slow to get to a stable 60fps in modern games, and the GTX is a mere 35W model, so yeah. The 8GB of soldered RAM don’t help any. Kids, remember to buy a laptop with upgradeable memory, or at least one that comes with 16GB in the first place. Still, I’m the one who wanted a thin-and-light that could play games fairly well for a low price. Shoot for the moon, as they say.

Nobody will complain even if there are some jaggies, and even performance isn’t all that. What matters is that I’m ready for Lightfall when it comes out.

Can’t complain too much though. As a whole, this notebook has served me well enough. Destiny 2 runs well as long as you can suffer some framerate uncertainty in heavy scenes, as well as truly unstable performance in PvP. Not that I care, the Crucible has been stuck in a rut for ages anyway. Other than that, the CPU and GPU are generally enough to run Xbox One games at 60fps… at the same settings and resolution, if the original was a stable 30fps and the port is good. So I’m afraid for Elden Ring and some other games I had to keep to 30fps instead. Doing that, however, usually lets you set 1080p and high details. Having all that extra power is very nice indeed.

Ok game, look at me for a moment. I may be below minimum specs, but I can run the benchmark at 1080p medium, at 96fps with lows of 84fps. Got anything to add?

Aside from the RAM struggle, VRAM also tends to be somewhat of a problem nowadays. Frankly, 4GB isn’t quite enough in recent titles. And keep in mind Windows 11 really wants some memory for itself, so it’s more like 3.3GB available. Deathloop takes a minimum of 4.6GB and it shows with stutter at random times, even when playing at 720p and low details. Darktide is more or less out of my league. I was surprised to find that even the new Lego Star Wars can’t keep a stable 60fps no matter what. You’d think the CPU would be able to do better there.

Not terribly excited about that red text. It’s usually not a good color to see. Did you know that in DX12 you can only have 90% of 90% of your card’s total memory? Sucks, yeah.

It’s a 35W card, which would technically be a Max-Q, but since Nvidia doesn’t make those anymore, they just call it a GTX 1650. Apparently it just keeps its clocks as low as needed to stay within the power budget. The overlay shows a maximum of 1740mhz, which sure is too high to be real. The actual performance is lower than the average GTX 1650 by a good 15%. More realistically, GPU-Z says it runs at 990mhz and can boost up to 1155mhz. That sounds more like it, if you ask me. Now, 3DMark 06 actually does a decent job here, since it gives me fillrates of 38GT/s in single texturing and 58GT/s in multi texturing, quite close to what you’d expect from 32 ROPs running, I want to say, in boost clock… and 56 TMUs running in base clock maybe? Performance is respectable still. Much better than the integrated Vega 7 for sure.

The main attraction. The device ID corresponds to a Max-Q. Make of that what you will.

The side show. Pretty bad, yet we have come a long way since my old Radeon Xpress 200.

Borderlands 3 gives us a vague idea of how things stand between the GTX and the Vega. Obviously, the 1650 is bottlenecked hard at low resolution and details, but you get a feeling of their respective powers, and it ain’t a pretty comparison.

Of course, such tests are kinda pointless. We are talking about a sixteen years old benchmark, whereas modern 3DMark says my GPU clock is closer to 1450mhz. A bit harder to believe though. Anyway, I would like to try 3DMark 06 on the old netbook, to find out if it really does have 12 TMUs. And given that I’ll be free until my upcoming change of life, I should have time for that. For now at least, I can enjoy life, free of worries for a few weeks. After eleven difficult months, there’s so much I need to catch up to. Books, games, you name it. Just not Elden Ring though, I already took care of that.

In other words, I can’t afford to be too lazy. Even if being lazy sure feels nice sometimes.