SB on mac system

[Gibsonm]

Suspect the $500 laptop might have a "not so good" graphics card.

[Jammer Six]

Oh, I'm not buying it, I just noticed it. She Who Rules suggested a Windows laptop as an option, that's why I noticed it.

 

It says it has a (copied and pasted) 

• AMD Radeon R7 graphics

Whatever that is. Is it good? Junk? (I suspect junk. It's [the machine] is in their "sale" or "deal" offers.)

[Jammer Six]

Here's the ad: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Dell-Inspiron-15-5000-Series-i5565-A000GRY-PUS-Laptop/productID.5090736100?icid=PC_Sale_r20_c01_mod-F_9954_QF9-00959_04242017

[Ssnake]

On 16.5.2017 at 5:43 AM, Jammer Six said:

It says it has a (copied and pasted) 

• AMD Radeon R7 graphics

Whatever that is. Is it good? Junk? (I suspect junk. It's [the machine] is in their "sale" or "deal" offers.)

 

The R7 can be anything from good to bad. If they don't say anything about the exact model, and if the notebook is out for 500 bucks, it's rather obvious that it can't be a top of the line product.

 

That being said, if you disable all the graphics options, particularly SHadows and antialiasing (and probably also post-processing) you can get decent framerates even from an Intel integrated graphics chipset (HD4000 and later). That surprised me in a somewhat positive way. Steel Beasts 4 is more CPU limited than graphics limited, so a high single thread performance will ultimately help you most. If you want to enjoy all the new visual improvements however, I don't think there's an alternative to ALSO look for at least a top of the line (mobile) graphics chip from two years ago. Outlook for the new terrain version: Lots of RAM is a good thing, although for PE users in normal cases 8GByte should suffice; if you can afford 16, consider them an option. An SSD will also be a great thing to have, and be beneficial for everything that you do with the machine, including pushing lots of map data around.

 

Well, what can I say. In high performance computing (whioch games are), bigger is better.

Edited May 18, 2017 by Ssnake
spelling error that distorted the message

[Jammer Six]

Well, I don't understand anything you just said, but I can build a hip roof. And forge steel.

 

My full backup is finished. I'm off to destroy my hard drive, wipe it down, partition it, install Bootcamp, Windows 10 and Steel Beasts.

 

If you never hear from me again, tell my wife I fought like a

 

(Then the channel went dead.)

Edited May 16, 2017 by Jammer Six

[Jammer Six]

Okay, that didn't work at all. But I ended up with a new Mac. It's a long story, and at the end of it, I sailed around Vancouver Island on a fifty foot ketch. It's complicated.

 

Tell me this: She Who Must Be Obeyed bought this Windows laptop: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WGP288R/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

She hates it. She says she forgot how much she detests Windows. She's going to return it, unless I want to keep it and play Steel Beasts on it.

 

So is this a reasonable machine? Are any of those offers to test Steel Beasts still good? If so, is there a chance I could join a game with you guys to see how well this laptop runs the game?

[thewood]

I would call that a laptop at the high end of mid-range.  That's based on the clock speed of the CPU being in the high 2's.  The video card is decent, and a lot better than an Intel chip.  You should be able to run pretty decently, but may have to drop shadows or back off on a couple other graphics features. 

[Ssnake]

Ultimately the best answer is to download and install SB Pro PE 4.0 on that notebook and try it out for yourself before she sends it back. That's something that you can do within an hour or two; if you don't have a CM stick, try a one-month license for $9.50. We can debate a long time whether or not the framerates will be okay. The answer is different for every user, and at the end of the day only your opinion counts.