Considering FW13 AMD - Q's about gaming resolution & Fedora 40 stability

[napghost]

Hi All! Currently on a journey of finding a gaming-lite compatible laptop that can remain functional and stable on Linux, as Windows has become too frustrating to use. I intend to stick with Fedora, as that’s whats running on my current laptop and gaming desktop. I’m a Linux newbie so roaming off the cobbled road and editing config files would require me to find documentation that rightly assumes I would need to be hand held step by step.

With that background out of the way, here are my questions:

1. How has your experience been on Fedora or any of the other officially supported OS’s? Have there been any showstoppers where you couldn’t progress until an update was provided? I was cross shopping between a FW13 and a Thinkpad T14S (AMD) and the latter has had multi-generational issues with WiFi stability that don’t appear to have an end in sight. I figure issues come up here as well, but are they critical and persistent? I saw this thread here FW13 AMD stability under Linux and the few results seem promising.

2. How does gaming “work” on the FW13 AMD, specifically, when it comes to resolution? It looks like the iGPU is suitably cut out for light gaming on indie/graphically simpler titles at 1080p-equivalent settings, but the odd native resolution of 2256x1504 makes me wonder how games look when you downsize to smaller 3:2 resolutions. Does it look “smeary/gross/wrong” on less-than-native, even if the aspect ratio is the same? Do a lot of games not like 3:2 and do you see a lot of black bars in your experience? I also see that Gamework (community benchmarks) has some hits, but it seems more performance oriented, and people are using Windows 10/11 which has some Hyper-RX tool that allows them to upscale back to native. I figure that isn’t quite a thing with Linux yet.

Thanks for reading my rambling. I have been watching plenty of reviews on YouTube but they dont seem to hit on my “pet questions”. I tried doing my own research here and on the forums before asking. Any response are appreciated!

[Adrian_Joachim]

@napghost

How does gaming “work” on the FW13 AMD, specifically, when it comes to resolution? It looks like the iGPU is suitably cut out for light gaming on indie/graphically simpler titles at 1080p-equivalent settings, but the odd native resolution of 2256x1504 makes me wonder how games look when you downsize to smaller 3:2 resolutions. Does it look “smeary/gross/wrong” on less-than-native, even if the aspect ratio is the same? Do a lot of games not like 3:2 and do you see a lot of black bars in your experience? I also see that Gamework (community benchmarks) has some hits, but it seems more performance oriented, and people are using Windows 10/11 which has some Hyper-RX tool that allows them to upscale back to native. I figure that isn’t quite a thing with Linux yet.

Ideally the game supports fsr (or whatever the intel one is called) and the up-scaling happens within the game without making ui elements and menus look worse. Though games that don’t have built in resolution scaling tend to be older ones you likely won’t even need resolution scaling in.

None of the games I have tried had particular issues with the aspect ratio or black bars or anything.

[Jonathan_Haas]

@napghost

How has your experience been on Fedora or any of the other officially supported OS’s? Have there been any showstoppers where you couldn’t progress until an update was provided?

Using Fedora 40, the biggest issue are problems with the video acceleration. The issue has mostly fixed itself with system upgrades, but I had to temporarily disable hardware accelerated video decoding in Firefox, otherwise YouTube videos would flicker permanently.

@napghost

How does gaming “work” on the FW13 AMD, specifically, when it comes to resolution?

Had no resolution issues, most games have settings to adjust UI scale or do so automatically depending on the screen resolution. Most simpler games run fine, but the laptop often gets hot quickly and the fans are quite loud. Not so much that you can’t touch the Laptop, but hot enough that you don’t want it on your lap when the room is hot anyway (due to the summer) and the fan noise is loud enough to be annoying without headphones. This applies to games like Factorio, Rimworld, and Parkitect who are not super graphically intensive. Reducing the resolution can help.