I spent my childhood with a desktop (mid 90s to mid 2000s) then I had gaming notebooks until 2018 or so, except for a 3 year period in beginning of the 2010s.
A gaming laptop (or even a mid-weight laptop with an eGPU) is always a compromise (in both directions).
A “gaming desktop” can generally do so much more than just gaming. I did video editing and encoding on my gaming laptop, you can make it work, it’s slow and the heat noise can get annoying (versus a desktop that’s possible to make quite even under load).
And with some ML video stuff like Topaz Video (*) even a powerful desktop can struggle, I can’t image using Topaz video on any laptop. Especially any tasks with 4K using complex algorithms beat my poor desktop to pulp (5800X, 3080, 64 GB, not the latest and greatest, but no slouch).
(*) I’ve successfully upscaled older video footage (586x320) from mid the 2000 by 4x along with X4 frame interpolation without it looking overly fake and being pretty decent quality. You can even do complex scenes like public events as long as you have source 720p footage. It’s like magic.
Also large storage is a pain with laptops. You really need a fast SSD with at least 2TB (it’s also good to have a secondary SSD) and another 10 TB+ HDD storage. This type of setup is difficult with a laptop.
For me steam deck has killed any notion of getting a gaming laptop. Decent spec laptop (7yr old though) which I rarely need to take anywhere, gaming desktop 5700/3070 and steam deck if I want to game. Though I’m not much into multiplayer. Tbh even at home I find myself on the deck more than the desktop for gaming these days.
I setup the docker container “Wolf” on my gaming PC. It lets me stream from my desktop to my laptop. I’m lucky enough to have WiFi 6 with solid coverage. All that combined means I can run at near native quality and hardly any extra latency streaming from my desktop to my laptop/steamdeck. All without the normal streaming issues of making sure the PC is logged in and ready to start a stream.
I wouldn’t do it for competitive shooters, but for the games I play, it’s great. Keeps my laptop quiet, and my gaming PC being a space heater in another room.
Technically, Wolf uses Moonlight, but I just use that to start the Steam container, after that, I use Steam’s Remote Play directly, because I’ve had the best results with it.
I tried that when I was in another city for a few months. It was all right, but I was on WiFi 5/AC and I live in a country where buildings have thick walls and sometimes there would be issues with streaming, even though I had gigabit on both sides and my desktop was/is on ethernet.
And I play strategy games, which from my understanding are a better fit for streaming than most single player genres.
I found myself playing older indie games that I missed (actually found a lot of cool stuff).
I’m doing it all in-house. Once the internet gets involved, all bets are off. Even going from 2 connections in the same town on the same ISP with gigabit fiber I’ve gotten unreliable results.
Oh OK! Yeah, local network is a whole different experience because you have a great degree of control.
Our internet infrastructure is probably in some ways better [*] than the US or Canada, based on my experiences living and travelling in North America, but it seems if you have WiFi involved anywhere in the chain, it’s difficult to get a good experience.
In the sense of a near universal median experience, we don’t have the high end stuff, the Verizon telecom service in some rural areas is impressive, but I will speculate the majority of households can get gigabit fiber for $15/month and mobile access is universal, cheap and competitive (but we don’t have 5G).
I spent my childhood with a desktop (mid 90s to mid 2000s) then I had gaming notebooks until 2018 or so, except for a 3 year period in beginning of the 2010s.
A gaming laptop (or even a mid-weight laptop with an eGPU) is always a compromise (in both directions).
A “gaming desktop” can generally do so much more than just gaming. I did video editing and encoding on my gaming laptop, you can make it work, it’s slow and the heat noise can get annoying (versus a desktop that’s possible to make quite even under load).
And with some ML video stuff like Topaz Video (*) even a powerful desktop can struggle, I can’t image using Topaz video on any laptop. Especially any tasks with 4K using complex algorithms beat my poor desktop to pulp (5800X, 3080, 64 GB, not the latest and greatest, but no slouch).
(*) I’ve successfully upscaled older video footage (586x320) from mid the 2000 by 4x along with X4 frame interpolation without it looking overly fake and being pretty decent quality. You can even do complex scenes like public events as long as you have source 720p footage. It’s like magic.
Also large storage is a pain with laptops. You really need a fast SSD with at least 2TB (it’s also good to have a secondary SSD) and another 10 TB+ HDD storage. This type of setup is difficult with a laptop.
For me steam deck has killed any notion of getting a gaming laptop. Decent spec laptop (7yr old though) which I rarely need to take anywhere, gaming desktop 5700/3070 and steam deck if I want to game. Though I’m not much into multiplayer. Tbh even at home I find myself on the deck more than the desktop for gaming these days.
I setup the docker container “Wolf” on my gaming PC. It lets me stream from my desktop to my laptop. I’m lucky enough to have WiFi 6 with solid coverage. All that combined means I can run at near native quality and hardly any extra latency streaming from my desktop to my laptop/steamdeck. All without the normal streaming issues of making sure the PC is logged in and ready to start a stream.
I wouldn’t do it for competitive shooters, but for the games I play, it’s great. Keeps my laptop quiet, and my gaming PC being a space heater in another room.
Technically, Wolf uses Moonlight, but I just use that to start the Steam container, after that, I use Steam’s Remote Play directly, because I’ve had the best results with it.
I tried that when I was in another city for a few months. It was all right, but I was on WiFi 5/AC and I live in a country where buildings have thick walls and sometimes there would be issues with streaming, even though I had gigabit on both sides and my desktop was/is on ethernet.
And I play strategy games, which from my understanding are a better fit for streaming than most single player genres.
I found myself playing older indie games that I missed (actually found a lot of cool stuff).
I’m doing it all in-house. Once the internet gets involved, all bets are off. Even going from 2 connections in the same town on the same ISP with gigabit fiber I’ve gotten unreliable results.
Oh OK! Yeah, local network is a whole different experience because you have a great degree of control.
Our internet infrastructure is probably in some ways better [*] than the US or Canada, based on my experiences living and travelling in North America, but it seems if you have WiFi involved anywhere in the chain, it’s difficult to get a good experience.