Today we take a break Hardware. I recently read on our facebook group “ Agricultural simulations »That if« you only have 4GB you cannot run Pure Farming or Farming Simulator and even less Cattle and Crops »... Let's see the solutions.
The development of a game
Developing a game takes time, often several years. And at the start of a project, the development team uses part of the budget to equip themselves with high-end hardware to be comfortable during the long development phase of the game. Also with the evolution of the hardware. , when the title is released in stores, which was high-end at the time, becomes mid-range.
Concretely, if we take the example of Pure Farming with its 3-year development, or Farming Simulator and its 2-year cycle, you should be able to run it without any problem with a recent graphics card but especially with 4 GB of RAM. which were already standard in 2015.
If you follow my videos a little, you will know that I am playing on an Asus ROG G552 laptop with 16 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GTX 960M and a 7th generation Intel Core i6. On this platform, no problem, even the recent update of the Titanic demo on'U runs in full without flinching. So you can imagine that an FS 17 or even a Cattle and Crops explodes the FPS counter on this configuration.
Power is not everything, far from it
A well-designed and optimized game makes it possible to play aging PCs. Today, in this video, I show you that we can run Farming Simulator on an Acer tablet powered by Windows 10, a meager 1,4 GHz Intel Atom processor and…. only 2 GB of RAM. This tablet was purchased 2 years ago. It is equipped with a 32-bit OS which limits the launch of Pure Farming and Cattle and Crops which are exclusively 64-bit games.
And to show you what I explained to you above, the tablet runs without problem Half Life 2, a game released in 2004. Behind Half Life, there are years of optimization of the graphics engine: the Source-engine. Result, the latest fashionable effects such as motion blur or HDR are present, and the tablet is doing wonderfully. It must be said, the models are period, and a character from Half Life 2 totals about 8000 polygons where some Farming Simulator tractors point to more than 100000!
Let's come back to Farming Simulator 17. The game starts and you have to go through the graphics settings to pass all the criteria to a minimum, including the resolution. If you thought you had a magnificent mobile version, it is missed. The game is ugly and difficult to play.
By the way, remember to activate the "game mode" in Windows 10 (win key + G) in order to give all the resource priorities to your game, this can save some FPS.
An alternative
So what do we do with this tablet? There is a solution. Today Steam allows the stream of a game on a local network in a very simplified way. You just have to launch the application on 2 computers and they are immediately connected. On the tablet, the games will no longer be grayed out and the “Play” option will be replaced by “Streamer”. One click is enough and the game starts on the most powerful config. The display is streamed to the tablet. This is how I use this aging tablet today.
You have been warned!, streaming monopolizes the PC on which the game is running, and it will no longer be available for other use during the entire game session, since it is sending the stream to the tablet.
When someone is watching the TV my Xbox One is plugged into, I quietly stream the game in my bed. It's the same for Steam games, the use is mainly at night and the autonomy of the tablet allows me to play for a good ten hours.