Laptop Specs?

[mattcolville]

Hey everyone!

I was running FG on my new Surface Book (512GB i7 16GB, dedicated NVIDIA GPU) but rolling the dice on it feels really clunky, seems like a framerate issue.

What kind of laptop should I be rocking if I want the dice-rolling to look and feel smooth? What's the limiting resource there?

[ddavison]

Hey Matt, I'm guessing that the specs are sufficient to run it smoothly on your Surface Book, but the graphics drivers for it are probably not doing a good job with the older DirectX9 libraries that FG uses.

Changing out graphics drivers can be a bit of pain, though, so maybe someone else with that same model can chime in with some settings or links to drivers that worked well for them.

[mattcolville]

Ahh, so would older drivers solve it?

[NotRussellCrowe]

Matt, do you have a 940m or similar for your Surface?

My laptop has a 965m which sits on top of an integrated video card. To make my dice roll smoothly I have to specifically set Fantasy Grounds to use the Nvidia card. Go into the Nvidia Control Panel, select Manage 3D settings. Then select the Program Settings tab in the right side of the window. Find Fantasy Grounds in the drop down or click Add and locate the .EXE. Once there choose to use the High-performance NVIDIA processor. Hit the Apply button.

17659

[ddavison]

I have seen cases where yes, older drivers actually ran very smoothly.

It's a bit of a crap shoot, but if you Google around for people running DirectX9 with the graphic card you can sometimes find someone who reports back success. There are a slew of games that still use DirectX9 that are more popular than FG

[Trenloe]

Also see if you can access the graphics card advanced setting and play around with some of the 3D settings. Anti-aliasing has been known to help, as have tuning various quality/performance parameters.

[mattcolville]

Matt, do you have a 940m or similar for your Surface?

My laptop has a 965m which sits on top of an integrated video card. To make my dice roll smoothly I have to specifically set Fantasy Grounds to use the Nvidia card. Go into the Nvidia Control Panel, select Manage 3D settings. Then select the Program Settings tab in the right side of the window. Find Fantasy Grounds in the drop down or click Add and locate the .EXE. Once there choose to use the High-performance NVIDIA processor. Hit the Apply button.

17659

We already did this. It made a barely-perceivable difference. The dice still seem to operate at around 3 FPS.

[mattcolville]

Is there a known-good solution? Like "Use this laptop and the dice will roll maximally smoothly."

Is it just a problem with the graphics card and drivers?

[LordEntrails]

It's just the graphics driver. Try making sure that you try the onboard and the Nvidia, make sure you try different drivers (latest, and old ones). You can also play with the video settings. Unfortunately, other than Anti-Alias'ing (which is a performance problem for many programs), no one has reported exactly what settings seem to work.

I could give you specs on a couple of laptops I run it on fine, but unless you want to buy something specifically...

[Zhern]

It runs without issue on my Alienware 15 R2 with a 970m in it. I haven't tried it on my Surface 4 Pro (256, i5, 8gb, intel gfx), but I can do so tomorrow to see if it acts funny. It won't be an apples to apples comparison but now I'm curious how it will perform.

[Trenloe]

We already did this. It made a barely-perceivable difference. The dice still seem to operate at around 3 FPS.
As I mentioned above, try different settings - start turning everything off and make a single change at a time to see what might be causing the issue. Sorry, there's no quick way, it's going to be trial and error...

[Talyn]

I had to add FG as a 3D application on my laptop too, but even then the dice don't perform great. Having said that, I just built a beastly desktop PC that runs everything I've thrown at it at max settings, including Star Citizen which is not optimized in the least yet, but the FG dice still roll at a pretty rough framerate. I think it's just the old engine architecture?

[Trenloe]

I think it's just the old engine architecture?
The underlying issue is caused by the old DirectX9 architecture, but you should be able to "play" with the advanced graphics card settings and get more smooth dice rolling.

[LordEntrails]

Yes, sometimes Max settings actually hurt. One example was with a gaming system I just built for my son, turning off anti aliasing changed the fps in league of legends from 30 to 300+

[Talyn]

Oh, sure. I just mean that on this new PC, I'm finally able to run max settings and have it fully playable to my standards, which my friends tell me are frustratingly high. :p

[ddavison]

Someone on Steam was reporting similar performance issues with dice rolling and they said this worked for them:



Try turning off anti-Aliasing FX in your graphics card control panel settings.

[Trenloe]

Someone on Steam was reporting similar performance issues with dice rolling and they said this worked for them:
Yep, that can be the culprit, mentioned in post #6 as something to look at. This reinforces what we've been saying in this thread - experiment with the advanced settings of your graphics card.