Wednesday 16 May 2018

Waffle and Subnautica....

Whats that smell..... 2.a.m. waffle!

One of the big problems with my gaming laptop (Alienware M18X) is that it isn't ageing well. Mainly due to it's graphics card a GeForce GTX 660M. And in writing that sentence I'm thinking I'm being a bit too harsh, elitist maybe.

The laptop does surprise me at times in both good and bad ways. The good is fine but the bad is the elitist in me, the graphical snob of lost frames, the doubt before the proof.

Take Subnautica. Playing the game on the laptop is the same experience, there's just a little more tweaking that needs to be done to settings to stop graphical popping etc.

Never mind the video recording/editing capabilities......

Some games can have settings altered, while others you just have to live with. It's a great laptop but to upgrade I'm need an external card and housing and more cables.... It removes the mobility of a laptop. Not that the laptop had a lot of mobility. The first time my wife saw it she called it my laptop desktop.

For now I'm not taking my gameplay in Subnautica too seriously on the laptop. If I do or discover something I'll make a save and continue on. That final save will be transferred over to my PC when I get home(cloud vs manual saves is a whole other story).

With a nice new save done today and on a whim I decided to poke my nose into a Reaper and see how long I could survive.


It's a game I keep having to remind myself to save often(it's worth it). Time to revert to that last save.


There are 'current' games I haven't installed on the laptop because I "know" they wouldn't run well like Hitman or Ghost Recon Windlands. Maybe I'd not be such a doubter if I actually installed and ran them.  Proof in the pudding. But I'm probably more forgiving of it's ageing shortfalls if I were.
The laptop's main use these day's is really a gaming platform for only a few hours one day a week. Or like now for a few day's to a week. As long as it can get my gaming and internet fix away from home then I'm sorted.


I've got a lot installed, old and new, all ends of the spectrum.
Minecraft, Domina, Darkest Dungeon, Stardew Valley, Euro Truck Sim 2, Rome Total War, Fallout 4, Star Trek online, Eve Online, Cold Waters, Planet Coaster, Surviving Mars, Divinity OS2 and Subnautica. With all those installed and a drive full of media(music/video's) whats not to like! I can't complain about content! The elitist can complain about the quality instead.
But wait, dig a little deeper and there's more...... Theme Hospital, Close Combat (2, 3 & 4), Evil Genius, Imperium Galactica, Guild of Dungeoneering, Tharsis, Peggle(I've just rediscovered Peggle's install and spent 20 minutes playing it).


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Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands Recommended Requirements

-  CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 3.5 GHz 
-  VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX970 (4GB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0 or better)


My laptop:

CPU: i7-3630 2.4GHz
VIDEO CARD: 2GB GeForce GTX660M

The only other specs that mattered were Windows 10 64Bit and 24 GB free disk space free, both of which my laptop has. So the CPU and Video Card really are the deal breakers.

I'll have to install GRW and see how it performs. And what I have to do to get it to perform in an acceptable way.... If it runs at all.

The Hitman Specs are a lot more forgiving!

Processor: Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3,4 GHz 
Graphics: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770 

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