Technical Questions. Re FGU on Laptop at RageCon (or any other in person event)

[Elf_Boy]

My laptop is a wonder of high tech and lets me play my games almost as well as if I were home on my main system.

That is until I wanted to use FGU as my character sheet at RageCon - gaming laptops are not known for great battery life to start with and with the Unity game engine loading the dedicated GPU would power up dropping the battery life even more.

Getting an hour was lucky - fortunately the GM had brought a power cord and I was able to plug in.

Any thoughts on extending battery life, is there a way to force FGU to use the iGPU instead of the 'big' one? FGU isnt very demanding after all.

-or-

I am also looking at getting a non-gaming laptop, one that is all about battery life but with an iGPU that can handle FGU, acceptably well if not awesomely.

This has lead me to systems like the Surface, HP OMNIBOOK X 14 (claiming 18 hours of battery), and others.

Would I need to get an intel/amd based system, or given performance is not my key need would ARM with x86 emulation work? Does FGU work on ARM with emulation (or even natively)?

Even better would be to have FGU up and working on my Android tablet or Ipad, are either of those an option?

Would be nice if I could save all my characters in a central repository, like my home/main computer, and be able to access from my laptop/tablet etc on the fly rather then copying the campaign folder from one computer to the other, either by network or USB Flash drive.

Any how, thank you to anyone still reading, for your time and, any input, thoughts, ideas, on how to move forward using FGU not just as a mobile character sheet for multiple game systems, also as my books etc.

Have the good day!

-EB

[LordEntrails]

Most graphic drivers (like NVidia) have settings where you can control the graphics settings per application. And often which GPU is used to run an application. Check out your options.
Second, laptops have power settings, change your from whatever it is to Battery Life, then it will last longer.
Third, FGU has some graphic performance settings, especially frame rate. See: Reducing GPU Usage - Fantasy Grounds Customer Portal - Fantasy Grounds (atlassian.net) (https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FGCP/pages/1638006786/Reducing+GPU+Usage)

[Sulimo]

This has lead me to systems like the Surface, HP OMNIBOOK X 14 (claiming 18 hours of battery), and others.

Would I need to get an intel/amd based system, or given performance is not my key need would ARM with x86 emulation work? Does FGU work on ARM with emulation (or even natively)?



I would be very careful with these devices.

It looks like the HP device runs the new Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU which is ARM based, not x86-64 based (like Intel/AMD CPUs). Standard Surface devices also use the new Snapdragon CPUs.

Windows 11 does have an emulation layer to translate X86-64 to ARM, but games (in this case FG) may not emulate properly, and/or may have very poor performance. Most of the reviews (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/surface-pro-11-and-laptop-7-review-an-apple-silicon-moment-for-windows/) I've seen say the emulation is pretty good, but some games do suffer, so it's possible that FG may run well, or it might not. Until someone gets one and tries it, there is no way to know for sure.

It's still very early days for Windows on ARM, and I doubt that FG has even been tested on it, much less natively compiled for it (I think (not certain) the macOS version of FG is still native Intel, not ARM (Apple M series)). The Unity tooling would need to be updated to support Windows on ARM before that process could start.

Microsoft does have a Surface for Business line that still uses Intel/AMD CPUs (instead of the Qualcomm), but they come in limited configurations, and will likely have battery life more in line with other laptops with Intel/AMD CPUs.




Even better would be to have FGU up and working on my Android tablet or Ipad, are either of those an option?


FG does not currently run on anything other than Windows (x86-64), macOS, and Ubuntu Linux. There have been talks about a reader app (for reading reference manuals) for mobile devices (iOS/iPadOS and Android), but it's not been released yet.