I've played EQ from the beginning and have had a few hiatus' in between. My work schedule has evolved to a point of 8 hour off shifts monitoring a PC screen that is otherwise spent watching movies or surfing the internet. Which brings me to my thread title. I'm looking at diving into EQ again to fill the time and have begun to look at portable options for play via a laptop. I've been leaning towards Costco as I'm a member and get 2 year warranty as long as it's not a touch screen model. My question is will the integrated graphics models support EQ well or should I opt for a dedicated graphics card model? Will I be able to multi-box (should I be forced to)on the lower tier laptop? I have a home PC that handles all I need at home so this would most likely serve this roll alone. Having said that, I'd prefer to keep the cost down as much as possible. Thanks Luc
I have a 2015 MacBook pro with an intel chip and integrated graphics. It runs okay but it runs hot. Heat can cause early component failure. The MacBook is also an ultrabook so the ventilation is not that great. I do sometimes use a cooling pad and they do help some. EQ is primarily processor intensive. The GPU demand is not very high. The benefit of the separate GPU is not so much about GPU performance, but rather, offloading the work from the CPU to reduce CPU temps. Unlike other games that have high GPU demands, the better GPU probably wont improve your EQ experience, except where the integrated graphics negatively impacts the CPU. I do have a eGPU (external GPU enclosure). For WoW, the eGPU significantly improved my frames rates, like 400% better. I could run higher graphics and the temps were lower. I did temporarily get the eGPU to work with EQ and windows on my macbook, the visual performance was not better, except where the offloaded graphics let the machine run cooler, so the fans were not screaming and I didn't run risk of lag from thermal throttling. So, imo, yes having a dGPU is better than a iGPU, but mostly in moving the heat away from the CPU and not so much in having more GPU power. I'm not expert, so I could be wrong, but that has been my experience.
The difference in a laptop with a dedicated video card vs one with onboard graphics is very large. That said, going to a dedicated card is one of the biggest price jump things you can do on a laptop, so if its not for primary gaming, just go integrated, not worth the money unless you are using it all the time.
Get a Ryzen "Zen 3" laptop CPU/APU with 15-35 TDP and there won't be a heat problem. As example a laptop with the AMD Ryzen 3 5400U which does has 25 TDP and a pretty good build in GPU. No need for a newer generation yet. Ryzen 5 laptops will be less money efficient. Also make sure to get one with 16 GB RAM which will cost just slightly more than 8 GB (70-90 $/€). https://www.notebookcheck.com/AMD-Ryzen-3-5400U-Prozessor-Benchmarks-und-Specs.511021.0.html
I strongly recommend a dedicated GPU, because it will benefit EQ, and multi-benefit multiboxing if needed. There are other GPU intensive workloads (games) out there where the extra horsepower will come in handy, if your attention should ever wander from EQ.
It won't benefit EQ. It seems that this game has zero or near zero support for 3D cards. Everything goes on the CPU. For many games a new APU (CPU with integrated GPU) is good enough as they are already very strong and going to be much stronger in 1-2 years which will mean doubled graphic power and even more. I don't see a bright future for dedicated graphic cards because they do produce very high energy costs and do cost way to much. Their cooling is also problematic and often noisy.
Those seem like opinions. My CPU runs about 20-30% utilization while my GPU runs around 25-35% per instance of EQ. For graphics benchmarks comparing APUs vs GPUs, https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ and https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ have lots of data to reference. You can see that APUs are not nearly as good as GPUs on performance, even the 2 year old mobile GPU is 2-8x faster than the recent models of AMD/Intel integrated graphics.
May depend on your graphical EQ setup and your graphic does not show the 3D load . When I used my old dual core CPU computers together with a dedicated 3D GFX card it always was near idle temperature while the CPU was at 70-90 °C / 158-194 F. You are right that APUs do currently perform bad in relation to dedicated graphic cards but it is still more than enough for an old game like EQ. On the pro side they do consume way less energy, are much cheaper hardware, and do keep the system cool which does include a much better case airflow. It does make a silent completely passive (fanless) cooled system possible, which is what I had done. APU does consume only 5.2W in idle at 39-42 °C / 102-180 F. The maximum temp is the value for a high summer room temperature like 26 °C / 79 F. Here the values for my current computer which is just a few months old. It does only use an office APU and the Windows energy savings setup is automatic underclocking (AMD Cool’n’Quiet). CPU is configured to power saving and low performance. Two EQ instances were running = two toons standing around in PoK. Processes GPU load CPU load
Short answer yes ...todays integrated graphics will run Eq on low ..try to go for an AMD APU laptop ..does not have to be new ..my 10 year old i5 mini laptop with no gpu and only 4 of ram runs it on low ..good for two boxing camping.
