The results are surprisingly good for everyone. To conduct the test, we played the same portion of the game on each PC as the same character (a female EXO Hunter, if you’re wondering), with the following settings:
Windowed Fullscreen (some laptops aren’t allowing the game to enter fullscreen mode. It’s a known issue, so we used windowed full screen to be fair)1920 x 1080p resolutionvSync off“Highest” graphics preset
Our testing rigs included an Asus ROG Strix (GTX 1050), Razer Blade Pro (GTX 1060) and Alienware 17 (GTX 1080). Destiny 2 doesn’t allow for use of many external monitoring programs and doesn’t have an in-game benchmarking tool. To test, we used the game’s in-game frame rate counter and observed the highest and lowest rates we saw. Note that the highest were often while standing still, while the lowest were in the heat of battle. Frame rates varied wildly while playing, and unsurprisingly, the more powerful the card, the smoother Destiny 2 ran. But I was pleasantly surprised by how well Destiny 2 ran on our GTX 1050 machine. It always stayed above 30 fps (our minimum threshold for being considered playable). And that was on very high settings. Turn it down to high or medium and you’ll have something even smoother. As for the GTX 1080, we only tested in 1080p, but you could likely push up to a higher resolution and still hit at least 60 fps. But no matter which Pascal-based gaming laptop you have, it will run Destiny 2 well enough to enjoy it in all of its beauty. The only issue you’ll face is that Destiny 2 is very buggy on PC right now. Besides the aforementioned bug that some laptops can’t run the game at fullscreen (windowed fullscreen is the best workaround), we had at least one laptop refused to go above 720p until several restarts. Additionally, players have had issues playing the game with GPUs in SLI, not seeing the Clan roster appear, and not being able to use the Windows 10 game bar. You can see a full list of known issues here. Image credit: Activision
Laptop Upgrade Guide
Previous TipNext Tip
How to Tell If You Can Upgrade Your LaptopHow to Install an mSATA SSD Boot DriveHow to Upgrade Your Laptop’s Hard Drive to an SSDHow to Install an M.2 SSD in the Lenovo ThinkPad T440sHow to Upgrade the RAM on the Lenovo ThinkPad T440sHow to Upgrade the RAM (Memory) on a LaptopHow to Upgrade the SSD in Your MacBook ProHow to Upgrade Your Alienware 17’s SSD and Hard DriveHow to Upgrade Your Alienware 17’s RAMHow to Upgrade Your Dell XPS 13’s SSDHow to Upgrade Your ThinkPad 13’s RAMHow to Upgrade Your ThinkPad 13’s SSDHow to Upgrade Your ThinkPad T460s’ RAMHow to Upgrade Your ThinkPad T460s’ SSD