Trees with no leaves.

I'm using a laptop that only has a crappy Intel graphics engine. It works fine, but with very low graphics settings. Of course, it's extremely laggy in any of the foresty maps, and to my understanding, there's no way to hide just the leaves of the trees. I want to be able to get rid of the detailed, laggy part of them while still being able to see the important stuff; otherwise I'll just be crashing into invisible trees all the time.

(As a side note, does anyone use an external graphics card on a non-gaming laptop? All my other specs are well above the minimum, so I could probably run much better details with something like that.)

 

you can't really connect external graphics cards to 99% of laptops

 

He could, with an eGPU adapter. but maybe u loose your wireless lan card for that, most laptops have just one miniPCIe slot.

 

which is pcie x1 only, which current GPUs do not support operation over.

 

Thats where die eGPU adapter comes in, it is doing all the work, the point is, you can't use a GTX 970, or at least you shouldnt. It should ran fine with a GTX750Ti/760 or a GTX950/960 or even a Radeon Card.

 

thats not where the eGPU adapter comes in. The miniPCIe interface is PCIe x1 only. NVidia and AMD drivers no longer operate in this mode and require x4 bare minimum for display output and x8 for full hardware acceleration. eGPU adapters cannot overcome this limitation. Older cards did work in x1, but for display output only, non accelerated.
The external adapters give you the physical x16 slot only, electrically its still x1, they arent actually indended for GPU usage and are more commonly used with sound cards and raid controllers.

Thunderbolt does offer external PCIe x4. Nothing on the market except a few proprietary systems on alienware and msi laptops offers higher than this.

 

i got you now, nvidia tried to limit it, but you can mess around with that, already tried it myself with a GTX760 by evga. Neither i tested it with a older card of mine, radeon hd5850. It had an issue with USB Ports; When i plugged a USB device into the laptop, the screen went black for like 5-10 seconds and windows displayed me "The GPU driver was restored after a critical error"

 

You just dont have enough bandwidth even on the x4 to communicate with it fast enough to achieve full performance. Everything bar the lowest end or older cards is just bottlenecked.

 

i know that, but atleast you get a small power boost. After i had done this shitty work of putting this together, i had around 30fps more as the laptop gave me with the internal mobility HD4650 which i OC'd with Bios flashings.. Was an Core i7 720qm with 8Gigs of ram. Acer Aspire 5940g