Surface Pro 4 gaming?

Gymrat313

I have recently bought a SP4 for work and school. I was just wondering if anyone out there has tried playing any games(mmorpgs or otherwise). If you have, it would be nice to hear your experiences on which games work and run best on that platform. Thanks!

Quizzical

Gaming on that laptop will be hit and miss, as you'd expect from low end hardware running Intel graphics.  Some games will run fine, but get used to playing older games or turning settings way down.  I'd expect most games to be at least playable at sufficiently low settings.

Also, be wary of heat, as ultrabooks aren't always built to handle being pushed hard for extended periods of time as games will commonly do.  At minimum, I'd expect performance to get throttled back pretty hard once it heats up.  If it seems common for games to run fine for a couple of minutes then suddenly slow way down, that's why.

Vrika

I've got a mobile device with about similar power. You'll be able to play old games with it, and also many indie games and browser games that have low graphics, but modern AAA games won't work properly.

My personal favourite is getting a Gameboy Advance emulator and some games from
 www.emuparadise.org/
It's much more satisfying than trying to get modern games work only to have to suffer from bad frame rate, and as an added bonus those games don't require you to carry a mouse.

hatefulpeace

Gymrat313 said:

I have recently bought a SP4 for work and school. I was just wondering if anyone out there has tried playing any games(mmorpgs or otherwise). If you have, it would be nice to hear your experiences on which games work and run best on that platform. Thanks!

I had a dell venue pro 11, which is basically the same if you have 8 gbs of ram. I was able to play 2 uncharted water online at once. I was also able to play black desert online at 15 fps. I dono about the surface pro, but with the dell you had to change the bios so it wouldn't underclock the cpu, to save power. So you could play anything but like BDO. WOW would work, BF4 would work, anything that isnt poorly optimized like BDO. ESO would work. 

Spellshaper

I have Surface Pro 3 and if you set graphics low, you can play a lot of games. I am playing LoL, Paladins, GuildWars 2, Battlerite, a lot of card games. A few games can even be played in tablet mode, but a lot of developers just leave a few bugs there, that prevent that. So is better to use Store versions of games for that.

Gymrat313

Thanks for input guys, I downloaded Civ V and XCOM:Enemy within and they seem to be running fine after some tweeking of the graphic settings.

maskedweasel

Surface pro's can run quite a few.. the Surface Book would have been better in general, but it's a lot more expensive.  The SP5 is releasing soon, thats what I've been waiting for to decide which surface I'll pick up.

Gymrat313

maskedweasel said:

Surface pro's can run quite a few.. the Surface Book would have been better in general, but it's a lot more expensive.  The SP5 is releasing soon, thats what I've been waiting for to decide which surface I'll pick up.

Yeah I definitely think the Surface Book would be better for gaming performance. I like the versatility of the SP4 and I saved a couple hundred dollars, which was the only reason I broke down and picked it up. I had a bulky laptop that was running Window's XP :proud:

Quizzical

If you want gaming performance, don't get an ultrabook.  Why were you looking to pay a high end price tag for low end performance, anyway?  Going to carry it around all day every day and value portability more than performance?

Cleffy

Anything older than 2006 should work OK. Intel IGP is still a joke with poor drivers.