October 27th, 2014
One Weird Trick to Boost FPS
My laptop can perfectly run some really pretty-looking modern games, but then it runs others like a dog wearing a cone trying to chew on its leg. It’ll keep trying, achieving moderate success in short bursts of determination, but it’s mostly just really depressing.
And then you spend hours trying to “fix” your computer, tweaking random things based on advice from forum posters of questionable repute, until, finally, the entire dog analogy falls apart.
I didn’t wanna play you ANYWAY, Wolfenstein.
Ooh, I got this. That slowdown happens because the processor/motherboard/chipset/GPU use what’s called RISC (pronounced “risk,” unsurprisingly) in laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices. It stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, and is rarely found in desktop computers. RISC hardware uses less electricity and so is a staple of the mobile computing industry.
What the hell does RISC mean, though? Well, it means that if your game uses some of those missing instructions, the hardware has to substitute a slower instruction, or worse, a set of slower instructions to perform the same task. Chances are that if a game uses a missing instruction often – and it probably does – it’s gonna experience a massive slowdown.
So, now you know why mobile devices aren’t recommended for non-mobile gaming unless they contain desktop hardware.
Good thing I left the laptop life behind. Now I’m a proud desktopman. It was like being underwater but now I can breath.