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TotalMoo can you help? To Laptop, or not to Laptop? That is the question.

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Hannodb

Hannodb

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Hi TotalMoo

As I've mentioned before, this game is my motivation for buying an new PC, and I believe that when you buy a new PC, you go for the best, or you're wasting your money.

However, I'm now sitting with a Conundrum: Should I concider buying a laptop instead?

There are 2 very important reasons why I'm considering a Laptop:

1) Mobility - If I go on holiday, I can take Cities:Skylines with me, and show it off to my friends.
2) Battery - Let's just say that the "Mayor" of South Africa is not the best, and now we have a power problem. Electricity is becoming increasingly unreliable, and the power can be switched off unannounced at any time. When you run the game on a laptop, then at least the battery kicks in and allow you to save the game when that happens.

But there is the flipside:

Appearently, Laptops do not perform as well as desktop machines, and they cannot be upgraded. Having the above mentioned benefits is all good and well, but if my laptop cannot process a very large city, then it isn't really worth it.

Since you guys at Paradox are much more clued up with what games need and how fast the industry is changing, can you guys give me a recommendation? Are you testing this game on any laptops as well? How is it performing? Do you think it would be safe for me to go with a laptop, or do you think I'm going to limit my city building experience with a laptop?

Thanks in advance.
 
Upvote 0
I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED

Okay so this is a tricky topic and I bet a lot of other users will be able to reply with more sensible information than I can, but I do know my fair share on hardware.

A desktop PC will always, no matter what, be more power/value for the money. When you purchase a laptop you pay a lot of extra dough for the mobility and size of it, which is why smaller/thinner performance laptops are expensive as ****.

As you have the added variable of unreliable power a laptop will of course have extra value where you live, although that can be solved by an external battery for your desktop (so basically an emergency unit in case things die that let you at least save and quit properly).

If you plan to travel a lot, go for a laptop. Otherwise I would always recommend a stationary PC.

When it comes to hardware requirements and the increase of these, well, another tricky question. I always lag one or two generations behind because their performance is generally OK for playing games on medium/high in 1080p and the price drop is really nice, but then buying current gen (for example a GTX970) is a nice investment if you want that nice power.
 
Thanks for your quick reply.

However, my most important question still remains: How will *this* game (I'm not a big gamer, I'm splashing out R15000 buying it especially for *this* game) perform on a laptop? I am willing to pay for a top of the range laptop, but I need to know that it will be able to deal with large cities. If not, I'd rather buy a desktop. Could you request that the dev team test it on laptops as well, and give us the recommended laptop requirements for running a large city?
 
Hannodb said:
Thanks for your quick reply.

However, my most important question still remains: How will *this* game (I'm not a big gamer, I'm splashing out R15000 buying it especially for *this* game) perform on a laptop? I am willing to pay for a top of the range laptop, but I need to know that it will be able to deal with large cities. If not, I'd rather buy a desktop. Could you request that the dev team test it on laptops as well, and give us the recommended laptop requirements for running a large city?
Click to expand...

These are our preliminary specs:

MINIMUM:
OS: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7/8
Processor: 2 GHz Dual core
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce 8800, 512 MB RAM or ATI Radeon HD 3850, 512 MB RAM
DirectX: Version 9.0
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Microsoft Windows 7/8 (64-bit)
Processor: 3 GHz Quad core
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX460, 1 GB RAM or AMD Radeon HD 6850, 1 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 9.0
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space

So if you're looking at a laptop I recommend googling the CPU and GPU to make sure they are at or above the recommended specs (if you want to run big cities and maybe add mods etc).

Important things are...

CPU: This will decide how well the simulation runs and be crucial for big cities with many Cims
GPU: Important to a certain level and then hits diminishing returns as the game is not too graphically heavy. I'd aim for something that's at least on the same power as a GTX660 to ensure it's never an issue.
RAM: Having 4gb of RAM is sufficient, but if you want to run mods and huge cities getting 8 or more is important



Hope that answered your questions, and yes, we do test on laptops too ;)
 
Thanks!

I think I'll go for that laptop then.

PS. If anybody who is knowledgeable about hardware has anything to add, please do. The more opinions I get, the more informed I am to make the right decision.
 
If you want a notebook which matches in comparison with those desktop recommended system requirements, search for a notebook with graphics cards as good as:

nVidia: 485M, 580M, 670M, 760M ... or higher
radeon: 6990M or higher

as far as CPU goes, you can't miss by a mile here.
intel: search for i5's or i7's and check for clock speed to be at least 3ghz.
amd: I don't know myself, but i'm sure they have equivalent examples. Just see if the AMD chip is 4 core at least and 3ghz. The rest are not as important details.

Ofcourse laptop CPU equivalents might be a bit scarce on cache, voltage and so on but they'll roughly get their job done. Just remember. A quad-cire and 3ghz. You'll be able to play the large cities, believe me.

Ofcourse you'll need 4 gb of ram and I also recommend watching out for slow RPM Hard drives. I recommend SSD drives anyway, nowdays since they've gotten cheap. Believe me, SSD drives are a valuable investment in your laptop.
 
Yes gaming laptop nothing normal from store the graphic cards in latops are not so good so it must be a very good one few years ago i buy a latop with 2 Gb graphic card but it was not able to run a game like Battelfield 3 or simcity 2013 or cim2 quite nicle, only with big lags or settings on low and its a gtx 480 m and a i5 quad prozessor with 3 Ghz i dont believe there will run Cities Skyline without lags too. Without a Laptop for more than 1200 € you will not have long fun. The true is Laptops most are not for gaming these are for work or videos. But i said this to soo much peopel they buy a laptop few years later they buy a desktop pc again ;) in fact its cheaper to buy two desktop pcs than one true gaming laptop. This is my point of view.
 
Aside from CPU power and Ram , which are pretty much same if you relate interms of laptop and desktop. The area where it;s really dodgy is the GPU . Because(incase of nvidia) The names of the gpu in desktop and laptops are same , just a added m in the laptop gpu so a gtx 660 will be gtx 660m in laptop , But the actual performance has a huge difference. So to cut it short , If you want to have atleast power of a gtx 660 , then you should look at a gtx 860m atleast in your laptop GPU.

ASUS ROG laptops are good gaming laptops , if you wanna look for .

you can get the one with 860m and i7 for around 1000 dollars and i7 with gtx 970m for 1500.

Although you will get more power for your buck in a desktop , but the convinience of playing skylines while travelling and playing it in your bed is something that you might consider.
 
Pico300zx said:
How will this game run on a Mac book pro with 16gig of ram?
My understanding was a Mac version is to be released also. Do you have the specs required to run it?
Click to expand...

Prelim Mac specs:

MINIMUM:
OS: OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.3
Processor: 2 GHz Dual core
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce 8800, 512 MB RAM or ATI Radeon HD 3850, 512 MB RAM
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.3 or later
Processor: 3 GHz Quad core
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX460, 1 GB RAM or AMD Radeon HD 6850, 1 GB RAM
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space
 
Hi!

i'm looking for a new computer to but haven't decided if it will be a laptop or a stationary

How well will this laptop run this game, and will this laptop be able to run games in 1-2 years? :p

ASUS G751JT (1426,5 euro)

CPU Intel Core i7 4710HQ 2.5 GHz/turbo 3,5 GHz
RAM 8 GB (3 free card spaces)
GPU NVIDIA GTX 970M - 3GB
128 GB SSD
1 TB HHD/7200RPM

If that's not good i will buy/build a stationary for same amount of money
 
D3nn05 said:
Hi!

i'm looking for a new computer to but haven't decided if it will be a laptop or a stationary

How well will this laptop run this game, and will this laptop be able to run games in 1-2 years? :p

ASUS G751JT (1426,5 euro)

CPU Intel Core i7 4710HQ 2.5 GHz/turbo 3,5 GHz
RAM 8 GB (3 free card spaces)
GPU NVIDIA GTX 970M - 3GB
128 GB SSD
1 TB HHD/7200RPM

If that's not good i will buy/build a stationary for same amount of money
Click to expand...

That will run most games a few years forward, but honestly if you don't need or really want the mobility of a laptop I can not recommend a stationary enough. You get so much more for your money.
 
I would suggest to checking the recommended system requirements instead of the minimum ones when getting a completely new hardware. With a better system you can run the game in a higher graphics quality. Also please take into account that system requirements are subject to change after we complete the compatibility testing! It is more likely the minimum requirements change than the recommended ones.

Recommend system requirements for Windows:

OS: Microsoft Windows 7/8 (64-bit)
Processor: 3 GHz Quad core
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX460, 1 GB RAM or AMD Radeon HD 6850, 1 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 9.0
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 2 GB available space
 
Thanks so much for all your feedback. This is really helping me to give me an idea of what to look for.

So far, I get the idea ASUS is the industry leader in gaming laptops.

Then I need to look for :
Processor: i7, 4 Cores, 3Ghz
Graphics card: gtx 800m+, 4 GB RAM
SSD Drive
8 GB RAM

I think those are about it.
 
Cities XL 2012 runs a HUGE city with:
12GB RAM
Intel Pentium G3258 (OC'ed to 4.0GHz)
Geforce GT 720
Windows 7 Home.
1TB HDD

No problem with lag, even with a low end Geforce. Built this one 2 weeks ago.
 
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