As mentioned in the title, I am at a cross road of if I should get an egpu enclosure. Being that the price is the cost of a graphics card on its own, I would like to know the specific games I play will run reasonable given the high investment. So it’s really difficult for me to make the choice without performance information on the games I play. As such, I need help from the lovely community here! Below will be listed the few games I play regularly. If you have the game, an egpu, and are willing to test it out, I would be ever so grateful! I’m looking to run these games at 1080p 60fps with hopefully most settings maxed out, I can settle with medium if need be though. The reason I’m asking this is due to not being able to find enough benchmarking information to make a decision. Thanks in advance!
Games: Warframe, No Mans Sky, Satisfactory
Also, this is my first post on the forum, so if this is out of bounds in any way apologize in advance.
First question, do you already have a FW laptop? If so, you should see what kind of framerate you can get out of the iGPU. Quick google shows that Warframe has exceedingly low minimum requirements and No Man’s Sky looks like it should be playable at lower resolutions like 720p Medium/High. Satisfactory looks like it can run on a potato so that should be fine too.
It’s not that I’m trying to discourage you from investing in an eGPU, you will definitely be able to play the games you want at the resolution you want with one (assuming you buy an appropriately powerful graphics card). It just may not be necessary.
warframe is not really playable with the igpu as I have tried.
I’d rather not run the games on potato mode.
the bullet points are merely to answer the questions in a more straightforward method and is not intended as being short with someone. I already have a sapphire 5700xt in my main rig which I plan to transfer into the egpu grated the cpu and thunderbolt link can perform enough in an egpu environment. I’m looking to cut down on everything I own (minimalism) so I can travel easily.
I just tested Warframe on the base i5 11th Gen Framework with a GTX 1070 in a Akitio Node Pro TB3 eGPU (so lesser powerful CPU and GPU than your hardware). Before figuring out I needed to ‘optimize the download cache’ for the game, I was getting ~35-40 fps at regardless of settings. Afterwards, I was able to get a solid 60 fps on high settings at 1080p.
Note: I have no exp with Warframe, but it was free so I was able to test play it for a few minutes.
I don’t have the other games you mentioned, but let me know if you could still use more data.
@Jade_Mathre1
Thank-you so much for testing this for me! I’d need to find another game that is both CPU and GPU intensive to simulate satisfactory in order to have enough data to decide. But I am now a lot closer to buying one! If you can think of a game that is CPU and GPU intensive that you have, please let me know.
I have Core X with GTX1660. User benchmark showed the same graphics score on the same OC settings between desktop (R5 3600x) and FW i7 1280p. My gripe about this setup is stability - I notice freezes, disconnects and restarts of the GPU. It is not going to be my “end game” setup unfortunately, unless new firmware fixes something.
At 1080p 60 Hz, typically games are going to be CPU limited. Open world games are generally pretty CPU intensive, so I tested The Witcher 3.
On High settings:
Average FPS: 49
1% low FPS: 24
I also tested a much more demanding game, Elden Ring. Adjusting the visual settings did not significantly reduce the CPU load.
On High:
Average FPS: 35
1% low FPS: 20
On Low:
Average FPS: 37
1% low FPS: 24 FPS
Again, I am using the base i5 11th gen Framework with a GTX1070 eGPU, so you would likely see better results.
My specs, admittedly awful for egpu use: GTX 1650 Super (ADT-Link board through thunderbolt), 11th gen i5, 1x16GB ram.
Warframe: 1080p 75fps with vsync on mostly medium settings (one or two on high). If you start cranking reflections and shadows, it’ll impact performance.
SatisFactory: 1080p 50-60fps medium to high settings
To max out settings, you’d probably want at least the midrange cpu, dual channel ram, and a more recent graphics card (which means a better power supply, which means either a custom enclosure for the ADT-Link or an actual enclosure), at the very least a 2060 but probably something in the 3000 series. Hope this helps!
@Be_Far & @Jade_Mathre1 thanks for the testing! I’m currently running a single stick 16gb myself. So I’ll be sure to buy another stick soon. Satisfactoy was my biggest concern of all of them. I think I’m ready to go through with the purchase now given the performance will be there. You guys rock! Now I just need to save up the money lol.
Glad to help! just a heads up on the budget side, I kept my eGPU choices purposefully underpowered for budget reasons and it still doubled the cost of the setup altogether. Granted, this was 2021, so I paid significantly more for a used graphics card than was reasonable, but that means that if you opt for more performance like you need to match your original specifications, you’ll end up with pretty similar costs to me.