Hello all, I got a new to me laptop about a year ago. It's a 2012 macbook pro 15-inch, pretty much view of "the perfect laptop." For me, it was really the perfect laptop for the price. I didn't have the time to build a pc, and wanted something portable and somewhat stylish for my e-commerce ventures and for school, and enough power to run some games. I'm not a mainstream gamer for the current hits, but I always loved BeamNG for the sophistication as a software rather than a sole game. I use bootcamp to run BeamNG and to refresh my Windows homesickness, because the 2012 (coincidental) home computer uses 8gb ram and an older i5 and takes about 5 minutes to load gridmap and a load of lag. My laptop has 16gb of ram and an i7-3720qm @2.50ghz and can overclock to 3.60ghz if needed (pretty much everytime I play beamng). It's been very reliable and have only run into a few minor issues (my stupidity mainly) and overheats even in normal use, typical for this model so i won't worry too much. BACK TO THE POINT: Those specs seem pretty competitive and it fans up really fast (loud and a bit whiny, like an airplane) when playing beamng. No surprise, it's a common action by this model, but the gpu is what I think lacks.... Italy is near impossible, West Coast USA crashes the game (what the hell even runs WCUSA lol). Italy Lite works pretty smooth without grass and low graphics settings. My gpu is a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. I'm not sure how this stacks up with the other hardware, but i'm surprised I have lag with two or three vehicles on a highway (MAtrix highway) map, fluctuating between fps, it's noticable if you focus a bit. Is my performance for the specs where it should be? Or is the hardware age showing. I bought it after a certified store upgraded it from an i5 and 8gb to the current hardware. Here's the screenshot of the gpu specs. Please let me know, thanks much P.S. The bold is all you really need to know. Hope you can help I talk a lot, welcome to my life.....
No offense but your GPU is a piece of shit. I'm surprised it can even run 2-3 cars on Matrix Highway like you stated. The performance you described is pretty much what one would expect with the hardware you have.
Thanks for the response. Do you know of any GPUs that I could possibly swap into my laptop? I'm not very concerned, but would be nice to swap. I could've gotten a decent PC for the price I payed for my laptop but it wasn't realistic for my personal situation.
Ok, no problem. I haven't cracked it open, but sooner or later it will be practical to have a proper PC
I have and strongly recommend an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1650. But it is a crap ton of money, so a 1080 ti is probably good, your current GPU is shit,(as said by @Speedster202) honestly, if you don't change, you may fry the disk reader(like I did) or bust a fan. (BTW if you get a 1650 then do not be concerned about noise, the GPU loves to make a racket.
Hey Phym, Thanks for the tip. GTX 1650 seems great, and I probably will be able to get that sooner or later, I have enough for that. I saw it for around $160 on amazon, I say that's pretty good. What do you think the GTX 1650 will be capable of running with my current setup (16gb ram, i7-3720qm)? Speedster said my gpu is soldered in, so I'm thinking of hooking it up as a external GPU, I found how to do that. Do you think that would be a good idea? Thanks much!
Your GPU with the current setup would be able to run six cars on matrix freeway fine, I have a (well, actually four)core i5 CPUs and 16gb of RAM, I can run twelve Late Model Stock Cars on matrix at around 25fps, so you could run(I would say) eight-ten cars(depending on graphics settings, let's use "normal" for now) on matrix at around 25-ish fps. Keeping your current GPU along with the 1650 as an external GPU, yes, that is a good idea.
No, depending on your laptop you CAN swap the GPU. On my old Asus K53E laptop, it has Intel HD 3000 graphics - but a higher up model has Nvidia 630m 2gb graphics. The only way you can swap soldered graphics is by buying the motherboard that has it and swap the motherboard into your laptop. But you have to be careful and make sure the motherboard is compatible with your laptop if the ports don't line up you're SOL. With MXM laptops, you can buy a card directly and swap it - IF your laptop is compatible which I would doubt it as MXM is mainly for highly expensive work station laptops or full gaming laptops. And if your laptop has a wifi card or a thunderbolt cable, you can run an E-GPU (External GPU). But you need a PSU and a full-size graphics card to do it, and a case for it. But your laptop is APPLE...so I highly doubt it would be swappable, and or motherboards from the same model but with different CPUs/GPUs would probably cost more than the laptop itself.
Could it be your laptop is thermal throttling, download HWiNFO 64 onto your machine, run it with sensors only enabled.. Run beamng for a bit, then alt tab to hwinfo, check the maximum columns, anything above 88c could be thermal throttling.. You might just have dusty fans. Even when not throttling, this machine will not be that fast.. Try lowering the screen resolution also, playing in a windowed mode (with the window being small!) if you like will also work and be sharp. You can't upgrade your GPU here. You've got to make do with what you've got (or buy a new laptop)
