I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with rhythm games. Most of them are not graphically demanding at all; after all, how much could some notes coming at you on a screen use? That being said, because your performance in the game is based on correlating on-screen objects to auditory cues, it’s important to make the latency (input, display, audio [less-so this one]) of your setup as low as possible.
Right now, I’m using a Thinkpad L390 Yoga, which thermal throttles like there’s no tomorrow, making even light games practically unplayable. When rhythm games do run, they are plagued with latency that makes my experience pretty terrible in comparison to Any Other Computer.
My question is: is there any cross-over between Framework laptop owners and rhythm game players? For those who do fall into both those categories, what are your thoughts on the laptop? I know that NotebookCheck’s measured 50ms latency is Not Great, but an external monitor is always an option for me.
Alternatively, does anyone else have any input (pun unintended) on general latency across the laptop?
Your responses are appreciated.
P.S.: gaming laptops generally all suck and are pretty unnecessary for my use case, and I can’t get a desktop due to my living situation.
also: osu! and Friday Night Funkin players need not reply.
Your shameless plug brought me back here, I originally didn’t answer due to me not being a rhythm gamer, so I’m not the most qualified to give a response…
In the hopes of bumping this thread a little for you, here’s my answer:
It’s not a gaming laptop, the screen definitely is more tuned to productivity. However, your thermal throttling issues from the lenovo will probably not carry over to the Framework. The fan can get loud, but nothing upping your volume or headphones can’t fix. I would trust the 50ms latency figure from notebook check on input lag, and I’d expect (non-VR) rhythm games to not stress the CPU/iGPU enough to add additional other sources of latency, assuming they’re not horribly optimized or require an RTX-onemillion card.
Overall use in my experience feels very fluid and snappy. My relevant components are a PCIe gen 4 SSD (not necessary to be gen 4, probably overkill), two sticks of 16GB 2133MHz RAM (so dual channel memory), and the i7-1165G7. General browsing is quick, windows are fast to open, and searches happen quickly. Gaming has been a pleasant surprise for its diminutive size. I haven’t tried any crazy triple-A titles yet, but competitive shooters have played with smooth FPS. Highly optimized titles like Valorant, Overwatch, and CS:GO which I tested played with solid 60fps. I spent some time tuning some hidden power management settings, so it might not be exact parity with out of the box performance, but handling of thermal throttling has been pretty graceful, leading to consistent frames on games which can’t handle full 60fps, no sudden spikes of lost frames when the CPU suddenly slows down to nothing. I expect the killer for a rhythm game to be stutter, so I include that last bit since it might be most relevant.
@Frosty thanks for the info, esp. on thermal throttling. I don’t mind loud fans, so long as they both do not come on during normal use (web browsing and such) and contribute to cool laptops. Also great to hear that lightweight competitive shooters work well: that’s a very good estimate for rhythm games, since there’s a bit of overlap in what people tend to need from them.
Thanks everyone else for the bumps. @RandomUser do keep in mind that more money spent on shopping for the wife = less money for expansion cards…
I’ve ran my fair share of osu! through integrated graphics in the course of nearly a decade (I started in 2013, around the AMD Richland APU days) and can say that if you can live with 60 Hz, then iGPU is plenty for osu!. Not to mention the new codebase (osu! lazer) that has separate input polling, update and frame rates makes even lower FPS rates very snappy.
For reference, my quad-core Skylake i5 of a mini PC can crank out 240 FPS on the frame rendering portions of the game, while keeping update and input polling at a breezy 1000 Hz (60000 FPS if you want to remember that in FPS speak).
