Titanfall on Laptops: Runs Well on Mid-Range and Gaming Models

Titanfall on Laptops

As Titanfall launch is nearing, many Youtube users have uploaded gameplay videos of Beta version of the highly anticipated first-person shooter game played on various laptops. My general impression is that Titanfall runs completely smooth on high-settings and resolutions on all gaming-class laptops on the present market. The game also looks pretty good on select mid-range machines with dedicated video cards and select notebooks with integrated graphics, but on lowered settings and lower resolutions.

Let’s start with the slowest laptop configurations among the tested. Titanfall can run even on the budget-class AMD E-series CPUs with integrated graphics, at least on the AMD E2-3000 dual-core with the AMD Radeon HD 6380G IGP. Of course, this game with impressive graphics looks choppy on this kind of processor, even at a low resolution of 1280×720 and all detail settings set to minimum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Gm4mBGRaKAo

Stepping up to a laptop with a class better AMD A-series processor enables noticeably smoother gameplay. The AMD A8-4500M dual-core chip with the Radeon HD 7640G integrated GPU can provide more than 30 frames per second most of the time, with details on high and screen resolution set to 1280×720.

The mid-range dedicated AMD Radeon HD 8850M 2GB video card in conjunction with an Intel Core i5 processor produces a very pleasant gameplay at 1366×768 pixels. The video below shows its performance under a well optimized mix of low, mid, and high settings.

The similar Nvidia GeForce GT 645M 2GB at 1366×768 pixels with almost all settings on High also delivers a really fluid gameplay as you can see in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1uYcLYNNZg

Smoothness of Titanfall Beta on non-gaming laptops indicated the gaming-class machines won’t have problems running it on high settings. Among the benchmarked gaming laptops the most basic one was the Lenovo IdeaPad Y410p with the Nvidia GeForce GT 750M 2GB and a quad-core Intel “Haswell” processor. The results show an average of 52fps with Settings on maximum, 2xMSAA, and 1366×768. Resolution bump to 1920×1080 reduces the frame rates to 31fps on average.

Finally, in the playlist below you can find gameplays on the full-blown Alienware, MSI, and Asus ROG gaming machines with the high-end Nvidia GTX and AMD counterpart series video cards, as well as some dual-GPU configurations. As expected, Titanfall is a real enjoyment on them.

What we don’t know so far is what the game looks like on the widely adopted Intel HD 4400 integrated graphics, used in so many mainstream laptops and the popular Microsoft Surface Pro 2 tablet. Judging from the specifications and benchmarks of other games, we can expect that the HD 4400 (on the i5-4200U, i7-4500U and similar CPUs) will run Titanfall about the same as the Radeon HD 7640G in the second video of this article.

Also, there are no videos of Titanfall on affordable laptops with the entry-level Intel Celeron and Pentium processors, but I assume it will be pretty much unplayable on them because of the sluggish Intel HD integrated graphics in these chips.

As a side-note, laptop gamers planning to buy the Windows version of Titanfall have to keep in mind that the full installation of it requires a huge amount of storage space: 48GB. This is especially troublesome for those who have smallish solid state drives in their machines, for instance owners of the 64GB Surface 2 Pro. Also, a 64-bit version of Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 is a must, so those running 32-bit editions are out of luck.

Other official system requirements of Titanfall are “AMD Athlon X2 2.8 GHz or Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz” processor or higher, 4GB or more RAM, “AMD Radeon HD 4770 or Nvidia GeForce 8800GT” or better, and 512 MB or more video memory.

The official launch day for Titanfall is March 11th. It will initially be available for the Xbox One and Windows PCs.

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