I used this service 3 years ago. I didn’t wanted to buy a new PC to be able to play games with a decent frame rate.
I switched over to GeforceNow now to play games online.
Cons of those services is the monthly fee
Pros - you don’t need to upgrade your system to play everything a full game settings.
You don’t have to pay the electricity bill for a high power consuming GPU
In cast of GeforceNow, you don’t need to download any games or update them. Just simply buy it activate it in steam and you are ready to play.
+1 for the eGPU—it roughly doubled the cost of my setup, but it was so cheap already compared to alternatives (XPS 13 most notably) that I was okay with that. I also bought during the pandemic, so gpu prices were ludicrous. You’d only go up by about $500 if you were to add an egpu to your setup now with the right power supply and pcie-to-Thunderbolt board or enclosure.
The performance difference is absolute worlds apart. Iris Xe does well for integrated graphics, but it can’t handle much more than retro and indie games. I’ve been running triple-A titles with respectable performance despite having the theoretical worst bottlenecks for an eGPU (i5 cpu, single-channel ram).
I’m of the opinion framework doesn’t need to create a “gaming edition” for brand reasons as well. They’re not trying to disrupt the market of clunky beefy laptops, they’re trying to show that the thin-and-light market cannot use form factor as an excuse for anti-consumer practices, and deviating from the flagship doesn’t really help that.
Caveats: pick your gpu well if you want to use Linux or just wait with the rest of us for dealbreaker issues to be fixed. Also, this is admittedly a more involved solution, but it’s Framework. More involved is the whole point (DIY, self-repair, etc).
