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List of system requirements for a laptop that can play SB with average 40 FPS and that for the next 5 years


Koen

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Hi all,

 

I’m trying to make a simple list of system requirements in order to buy a new laptop.

 

=> The aim: play SB with average 40 FPS and that for the next 5 years.

 

I based this list on the information mentioned on the forum.

Also, I had a look at the system requirements mentioned on the eSim-site: https://www.esimgames.com/?post_type=elementor-popup&p=1160

 

=>  2 questions pls:

1.       Is this list more or less complete and correct ?

2.      And in what order of priority could I rank the points on the list below ?

 

Being a computer dummy, you’d really help me – THX ! 🙌

 

=> Simple list of system requirements for a laptop that can play SB with average 40 FPS and that for the next 5 years:

 

a)      Internal RAM: min 8 GB – preferably 16 GB

b)      Processor cores: 4 good enough – 6 better

c)      Video RAM: 6 GB OK – 8 GB better

d)      Video Card

-> MINIMUM go for GeForce GTX 1070 (HIGH end): < “I would consider a GeForce GTX 1070 or equivalent/better "quite future proof" for a good while.”  <

-> OR GeForce 16 series – avoid ENTRY range, but start from MID range, that is GTX 1650 Super etc < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_16_series

 

-> OR better: GeForce 20 series – starts from MID range (no entry level) < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_20_series

 

e)      Monitor refresh rate:  min 144 mhz

 

Thank you !

 

NB in return I’ll try to make some scenario’s again 😎

Edited by Koen
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Asking for advice with a five-year hgorizon and a "guaranteed" framerate >40 is a task for which a serious answer is not possible. I might luck out, but I can only tell you what our design goals are.

 

SB Pro PE should always run decent on whatever current mid-range hardware is available at the time of release

For eSim Games visual quality is not the top priority; SB Pro shouldn't look deterringly ugly however. Therefore, if the artists want to take the route of physics based rendering I won't stop them. If they came to me demanding that we immediately switch to real-time raytracing, I'd say No.

Future SB Pro PE versions shall take advantage of most hardware capabilities that the given platform offers, especially parallelization. I would not want us to cap the usage of available CPU cores to four or some other arbitrary number when 16-core Ryzens are already pretty affordable today. Not every task is parallizable, so simply throwing more cores at Steel Beasts isn't guaranteed to eliminate bottlenecks, but when I recently made the choice between a 12-core and a 16-core Ryzen, I did not think very long about the extra expense.

 

With all that being said, I'd definitely go for 16 GByte RAM.

I'd go for the mostest-core CPU that still fits into the financial and thermal budget of the notebook (certainly a factor to consider too)

I'd consider a GTX1070 the absolute lower boundary of a five-year notebook's GPU. That being said, think out of the box for a moment. There are external GPU adapters for notebooks. You might be better off with a solution that has Thunderbolt sockets through which you'd connect an external GPU which might even be something that can be switched later. That way you could rely on integrated graphics for non-game applications and pull out the big iron only when the task demands it. You could pay for a reasonably-priced GPU right now, and a reasonably priced GPU of the future to upgrade later. I cannot guarantee that this is going to be the cheaper or more-potent-for-the-same-budget solution, but it may be something worth exploring.

 

Coming back to the question of "thermal budget", you should ask yourself if you want to be wearing headphones all the time. I have a notebook with a GTX2070, and whenever a game is on it's almost like an effin' leafblower on my desk. Without noise-cancelling earphones it's just not bearable.

If you value silence in operation most of the time, a small tower is always going to be superior and cheaper for the same performance, or faster for the same budget. They just suck in transportability.

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@Koen A few questions for you:

 

First of all, how much is your budget for this laptop. Second thing is regarding to the 144hz monitor. You first mentioned that the goal is to play SB, but SB rarely tops 60fps. So I assume that you want this feature in order to do other things besides SB, perhaps other games? In that case, don't want to sound rude, but you're being overly optimistic with those specs to remain viable for next 5 years. I don't know what's your budget, but the minimum, in my opinion, would be a system with at least a nvidia 3060 and 32gb ram. I have a 1070ti paired to a ryzen 5 3600 in a very well ventilated full atx pc. This gpu is already long past its time.

 

Long time ago, I was stuck with laptops so the solution I found was to have a spare monitor which I connected my laptop to, in order to play games. That might be a solution for you.

 

Edited by stormrider_sp
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27 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

I don't think that the RAM requirements will grow massively beyond 16 GByte. Sure, more is always more, but 16 should do it for a good while.

It depends on the use. For gaming, 16gb can be enough most of the time. For different kinds of work, like video editing, gis, illustration, architecture, engineering and others, 32gb is highly regarded.

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1 hour ago, stormrider_sp said:

@Koen A few questions for you:

 

First of all, how much is your budget for this laptop. Second thing is regarding to the 144hz monitor. You first mentioned that the goal is to play SB, but SB rarely tops 60fps. So I assume that you want this feature in order to do other things besides SB, perhaps other games? In that case, don't want to sound rude, but you're being overly optimistic with those specs to remain viable for next 5 years. I don't know what's your budget, but the minimum, in my opinion, would be a system with at least a nvidia 3060 and 32gb ram. I have a 1070ti paired to a ryzen 5 3600 in a very well ventilated full atx pc. This gpu is already long past its time.

 

Long time ago, I was stuck with laptops so the solution I found was to have a spare monitor which I connected my laptop to, in order to play games. That might be a solution for you.

 

 

 

@stormrider_sp

 

1. BUDGET: max. 1500 EUR

 

2. 144hz monitor:

Actually the goal is a) do light stuff in word, excel etc & b) gaming: well I only play 1 game: SB (no joke)

I wrote "144 hz", just bcs I saw it mentioned elsewhere & bcs I'm PC hardware illiterate

Maybe SB does not require 144 hz ?

 

thx !

 

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Asking for advice with a five-year hgorizon and a "guaranteed" framerate >40 is a task for which a serious answer is not possible. I might luck out, but I can only tell you what our design goals are.

 

SB Pro PE should always run decent on whatever current mid-range hardware is available at the time of release

For eSim Games visual quality is not the top priority; SB Pro shouldn't look deterringly ugly however. Therefore, if the artists want to take the route of physics based rendering I won't stop them. If they came to me demanding that we immediately switch to real-time raytracing, I'd say No.

Future SB Pro PE versions shall take advantage of most hardware capabilities that the given platform offers, especially parallelization. I would not want us to cap the usage of available CPU cores to four or some other arbitrary number when 16-core Ryzens are already pretty affordable today. Not every task is parallizable, so simply throwing more cores at Steel Beasts isn't guaranteed to eliminate bottlenecks, but when I recently made the choice between a 12-core and a 16-core Ryzen, I did not think very long about the extra expense.

 

With all that being said, I'd definitely go for 16 GByte RAM.

I'd go for the mostest-core CPU that still fits into the financial and thermal budget of the notebook (certainly a factor to consider too)

I'd consider a GTX1070 the absolute lower boundary of a five-year notebook's GPU. That being said, think out of the box for a moment. There are external GPU adapters for notebooks. You might be better off with a solution that has Thunderbolt sockets through which you'd connect an external GPU which might even be something that can be switched later. That way you could rely on integrated graphics for non-game applications and pull out the big iron only when the task demands it. You could pay for a reasonably-priced GPU right now, and a reasonably priced GPU of the future to upgrade later. I cannot guarantee that this is going to be the cheaper or more-potent-for-the-same-budget solution, but it may be something worth exploring.

 

Coming back to the question of "thermal budget", you should ask yourself if you want to be wearing headphones all the time. I have a notebook with a GTX2070, and whenever a game is on it's almost like an effin' leafblower on my desk. Without noise-cancelling earphones it's just not bearable.

If you value silence in operation most of the time, a small tower is always going to be superior and cheaper for the same performance, or faster for the same budget. They just suck in transportability.

 

@Ssnake Helpful, thx !

The External GPU-idea is interesting

RE "the mostest-core CPU": the pricerange I'm looking at (1500 EUR) seems to be limited to max. 6 cores => is this OK for today's SB ? (or is it already old hat ?)

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I was in an online session recently where one of the participants was using a Mac (of an unspecified type), running a program that let him run Steel Beasts in windows, and an external GPU.  He said he was getting a solid 60 fps with his configuration.

Edited by TSe419E
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2 hours ago, Koen said:

 

 

@stormrider_sp

 

1. BUDGET: max. 1500 EUR

 

2. 144hz monitor:

Actually the goal is a) do light stuff in word, excel etc & b) gaming: well I only play 1 game: SB (no joke)

I wrote "144 hz", just bcs I saw it mentioned elsewhere & bcs I'm PC hardware illiterate

Maybe SB does not require 144 hz ?

 

thx !

 

 

@Ssnake Helpful, thx !

The External GPU-idea is interesting

RE "the mostest-core CPU": the pricerange I'm looking at (1500 EUR) seems to be limited to max. 6 cores => is this OK for today's SB ? (or is it already old hat ?)

$1500 is a fair sum and will get you in a good shape. 144hz is not usable for SB for the moment, it's hard-limited to 60fps, although the smoothness that a 144hz monitors provides makes it really hard to go back to 60fps. This is one of the reasons why I couldn't yet upgrade my 1070ti; my monitor is an old gen 144hz with a DVI input which was retired from the next generation of GPUs after the GTX 10xx, so for me it would mean to the hefty price of a new GPU plus a new 144hz monitor. I have a second monitor here which I use mainly for image editing, but even overcloking it to 76hz, the satisfaction feeling from the 144hz smoothness is not there, so I hardly use it these days. Where in Europe are you?

 

Cheers

 

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I found here in France, a MSI laptop with a 3060. I recommend that you have a look around there in BE for a similar config. That should give you a good starting point. The good thing about laptops is that there aren't too many choices to choose from. The bad thing is that they are limited by their power. On a desktop PC, the components can draw a lot more power because they can have better power supply units and a lot more cooling potential, so think it through.

 

https://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00401165.html

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I don't know whether this will help or not, but I run SB 4.250 on a my dual laptop just fine.

 

NOTE:  I have not re-tested with SB 4.259 which is supposed to improve performance, however, I've been really happy with my setup.

 

I have a 4 year old MacBook Pro 15” 2017 (Model A1707) Intel Core i7 3.1 GHz machine with an internal Radeon 560 dGPU, which is my primary computer for business and general use.  Obviously with the internal dGPU on the Mac, I was struggling in the last year had to run SB with much lower screen resolutions and reduced settings just to get FPS in the 19's and 20's range to make it playable at all.

 

Then my wife (God bless her) noticed how much time I spent in SB and she bought me a Sapphire AMD 5700XT graphics card mounted in an external chassis (Razer X Chroma) which plugs into the TB3 port on my Mac.  I'm running updated and current Windows 10 under Apple's Bootcamp, booting from a standalone "external" Samsung T7 SSD, which works great by the way. I have a Dell 27" 144 Hz Gaming Monitor plugged into the back of the 5700XT via a Razer X Chroma Displayport connection. 

 

I've been running 21.2.3 AMD current drivers successfully on Windows 10 and I set SB to the MAXIMUM screen resolution it allows and crank up the graphics settings.

 

I get over 50 FPS all the time regardless of screen activity with SB 4.250.  I'll try to test SB 4.259 soon and see what it yields.

 

So, I have 2 computers and operating systems in one box meeting multiple business and gaming needs.  I know I'm good for the next several years.

Edited by BadgerDog
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2 hours ago, stormrider_sp said:

I found here in France, a MSI laptop with a 3060. I recommend that you have a look around there in BE for a similar config. That should give you a good starting point. The good thing about laptops is that there aren't too many choices to choose from. The bad thing is that they are limited by their power. On a desktop PC, the components can draw a lot more power because they can have better power supply units and a lot more cooling potential, so think it through.

 

https://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00401165.html


Merci bcp !

 

Checking

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 if you can afford to buy a new computer now (notwithstanding the merits of a notebook computer vs. a desktop ), i would recommend buy now. this may sound philosophical or whatever, but i say this because you can only do something now. even five years from now, it will still be now when you buy a new computer (or not). you will not perceive yourself as living in the future five years from now when you get there the same way you don't perceive yourself as living years in the future right now from 2016 asking this question. it is always now- you are either playing steel beasts now, or you are not, in both cases you are doing that or not doing that now.

 

asking this sort of question is probably a symptom that you are leaning on the fence, but you would like confirmation from others, which is probably natural. but if you can afford it and you get good recommendations here or somewhere else, buy now, if you feel you need to upgrade in five years from now and you can afford to,  do it then- otherwise you are rather always stuck in the same position of waiting for the future before you upgrade. for all you know some other life event may intervene between now and five years and you never get to play steel beasts again for some reason or maybe not as much as you'd like to. all of us have to do it- at some point you take the plunge and throw the money down. or course there is that nagging feeling somewhere that you should wait because hardware inevitably becomes obsolete and you want to stretch it out as long as you can, but there is no way to win that game because whatever you buy will become obsolete, no question about that. you don't have to be concerned with it because it is inevitable. so you may as well enjoy yourself now- in fact, you will find my advice is unnecessary and redundant, because you don't have a choice in the matter. whenever you do decide to buy a computer, when it happens, it will be happening now. muahahahaha

 

 

 

 

Edited by Captain_Colossus
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WRT the 144Hz thing, this is primarily a VR/3D shutter glasses requirement so that each eye gets updates at 72 Hz.

Yes, Steel Beasts can't take advantage of faster monitors right now because he have a framerate cap at slightly over 60Hz based on the experience that high framerate variations were more detrimental to the game experience than a smoothed out version at a lower framerate.

Nevertheless, future versions of SB Pro might lift this artificial cap, assuming that the new engine actually manages to maintain much higher framerates in all situations. Even then, though, I don't see us reworking all vehicle interiors to accommodate the requirements for a VR/3D glasses version.

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6 hours ago, Koen said:

RE "the mostest-core CPU": the pricerange I'm looking at (1500 EUR) seems to be limited to max. 6 cores => is this OK for today's SB ? (or is it already old hat ?)

Six cores aren't bad and will do in the future, but I suspect that most notebook models that you checked so far are Intel CPU based, and Intel simply is way behind AMD at the moment. AMDs Ryzen 4000 series offer more core bang for the buck, but notebook manufacturers are slow to adapt AMD solutions; they simply remain an unconventional solution (and in computing that's not necessarily a compliment). But if you find a model with a Ryzen 4xxx CPU, it may be worth a second look to see if it fits all other requirements.

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11 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Six cores aren't bad and will do in the future, but I suspect that most notebook models that you checked so far are Intel CPU based, and Intel simply is way behind AMD at the moment. AMDs Ryzen 4000 series offer more core bang for the buck, but notebook manufacturers are slow to adapt AMD solutions; they simply remain an unconventional solution (and in computing that's not necessarily a compliment). But if you find a model with a Ryzen 4xxx CPU, it may be worth a second look to see if it fits all other requirements.

+1

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17 hours ago, Captain_Colossus said:

 if you can afford to buy a new computer now (notwithstanding the merits of a notebook computer vs. a desktop ), i would recommend buy now. this may sound philosophical or whatever, but i say this because you can only do something now. even five years from now, it will still be now when you buy a new computer (or not). you will not perceive yourself as living in the future five years from now when you get there the same way you don't perceive yourself as living years in the future right now from 2016 asking this question. it is always now- you are either playing steel beasts now, or you are not, in both cases you are doing that or not doing that now.

 

asking this sort of question is probably a symptom that you are leaning on the fence, but you would like confirmation from others, which is probably natural. but if you can afford it and you get good recommendations here or somewhere else, buy now, if you feel you need to upgrade in five years from now and you can afford to,  do it then- otherwise you are rather always stuck in the same position of waiting for the future before you upgrade. for all you know some other life event may intervene between now and five years and you never get to play steel beasts again for some reason or maybe not as much as you'd like to. all of us have to do it- at some point you take the plunge and throw the money down. or course there is that nagging feeling somewhere that you should wait because hardware inevitably becomes obsolete and you want to stretch it out as long as you can, but there is no way to win that game because whatever you buy will become obsolete, no question about that. you don't have to be concerned with it because it is inevitable. so you may as well enjoy yourself now- in fact, you will find my advice is unnecessary and redundant, because you don't have a choice in the matter. whenever you do decide to buy a computer, when it happens, it will be happening now. muahahahaha

 

 

 

 


I’m on the fence indeed:

* With my current laptop I play on average at some 25-30 FPS (or lower or more)

* A new laptop would bring this up to + 40 FPS, I guess

 

=> Is a difference of 10 - 15 FPS very visible ?
=> Does it make a difference in gameplay ?

 

(pls help me off the fence 😎)

 

NB current laptop has a Geforce GTX 860m from ca. 2015. Kudos to SB that I still get 25/30 FPS with such old hardware

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On 4/3/2021 at 4:45 PM, Ssnake said:

Keep the old model until you're no longer happy with it. It's that simple.

 

Wise words.

 

THX all for your helpful advice !

 

I ordered this machine: HP Gaming laptop OMEN 15-en0014nb (2Z9C6EA)

  • AMD Ryzen 7 4800H
  • RAM: 16 GB
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
  • 1140 EUR (reduced max. budget after consultation with das Ubercommando-des-Hauses) 

 

Will let you know how this works with SB

 

Hey, I'm happy, a dream became true 😊

 

For memo, a review of a similar machine, HP Omen 15-en0375ng but with 60 Hz display instead of 144 Hz:

HP Omen 15 laptop Review: Strong AMD processor makes Intel tremble - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

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I sometimes play Steel Armor: Blaze of War and the FPS I get is a lot worse than SB. But the fact is, both are far worse than any other 3D games I have. Maybe this is because the priority is accurate physics over eye-candy. On the other hand, tank simulators are such a niche product that a big graphics overhaul probably isn't worth the cost. It's about economies of scale - you have to divide a fixed cost by the number of sales. 

 

I'm fairly happy with what SB is given what I pay for it. That's all capitalism can ever offer ...🙂

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On 4/2/2021 at 2:09 PM, Ssnake said:

I don't think that the RAM requirements will grow massively beyond 16 GByte. Sure, more is always more, but 16 should do it for a good while.

I would recommend 16GB as a bare minimum, 32GB or more is preferable.

Win 10 is bit of a RAM hog

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It's not really that much worse than Windows 7, actually. Then question is how much crud is running in the background, of course. Also memory fragmentation may sometimes be an issue if you have the machine running for a long time. Windows 10 seems to use more memory because it's more aggressively caching old stuff rather than clearing memory right away.

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20 hours ago, Ssnake said:

It's not really that much worse than Windows 7, actually. Then question is how much crud is running in the background, of course. Also memory fragmentation may sometimes be an issue if you have the machine running for a long time. Windows 10 seems to use more memory because it's more aggressively caching old stuff rather than clearing memory right away.

Talking about caching junk, my current win10 installation takes about 10 minutes to shutdown because of that. The condition was further aggravated when I cloned it into this SSD when I last upgraded its motherboard and cpu.

 

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