Playing FH5 on underspec laptop in remote location

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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I recently returned from a 3-week trip to a remote village here in Papua New Guinea. One of the things I did was install satellite Internet for me, my family, and my team of local language workers. With download speeds of 70Mbps, this was a huge leap from our previous mobile connection that was limited to 2 bars of 3G and more often not even connectible.

While there, I decided to give FH5 a go. We only have 480 watts of solar in our village house and about the same in the office, so my Xbox Series X wasn’t even considered as a possibility to take to the village with me. Instead I was using my HP Spectre x360 convertible 13" laptop (16GB ram, Intel i7-1065G7 cpu @ 1.3 GHz, Intel Iris graphics) which was way below specifications for basic gaming, let alone something like FH5. My goal was to get enough points each week to get the Festival Playlist exclusive cars.

You know it’s bad when starting FH5, the computer says that you really shouldn’t even be thinking about playing this, but gives you the option to go ahead anyway. After FH5 spent a while figuring out what visuals it might be able to give me, I was able to play. But it was not great by any measure. The graphics and input lag were obviously subpar. And occasionally I would be driving and encounter a memory write error and the game would just close.

I determined that the easiest way to get the 20 points was to attempt the Trial each week. While my performance was way below my usual standards and I often relied on being carried by teammates, I was able to complete it each week, and occasionally even place in the top three. But the Trial in Series 9 Winter was worst. 93% through the second race and I would get the memory write error every time. I ended up deciding to drive that one more slowly so that the race would timeout before I could get to 90%. I finished at 80% in last place but was able to register the team win.

I decided that for future village trips I cannot function playing on my laptop. So I found a used Series S in Australia and will be taking that and a low-wattage 15.6-inch potable screen with me next time. They are lightweight for the helicopter flights (probably 3 kg total) and low wattage for the solar electric system (maybe 85 watts during gameplay which is just 20 watts more than my laptop).

If any of you happened to be on my Trial team this past month, thank you for carrying me.

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Could you not possibly play on your laptop and stream through cloud with 70mbps dl?

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The Internet provider didn’t have unlimited plan space for us and we are on a capped plan (100GB/month) until a slot opens up. So with me, my wife, daughter and two coworkers all using the Internet, we had to be frugal with our usage and streaming was not an option as the main reason for the new Internet connection is so the work can happen.

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For those interested, here are a few pics. First is of me configuring the transceiver on the satellite dish on the roof of our house. The second is of our office. You can see evidence of an underground Cat6 cable in the second picture with lighter colored grass.

Chris-Satellite-Dish-Roof-by-Bape
Chris-Satellite-Dish-Roof-by-Bape1080×1836 264 KB

NetworkCablePath
NetworkCablePath3000×4000 6.71 MB

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What about Starlink? Is that a viable option?

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Not in the country yet. And the equipment requires an even larger solar system.

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Hopefully the series S works for you.

I assume a jackery or other battery bank is out of the question. I’m guessing weight and size are major concerns, plus I don’t think you can take those things on planes.

While I doubt we were ever matched together, if we were you’re more than welcome for the carry.

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Our house system includes 3x 160W panels, a 30Amp controller (soon to be upgraded to 60A), and a bank of 2x 195 AHr sealed batteries. The batteries cost about $800 each and that doesn’t include the helicopter charges to get them to the village.

The flights are chartered and the aircraft are owned by our NGO, so we can take hazardous goods as long as there aren’t other passengers except us. We’ve taken batteries, propane gas bottles, kerosene, and gas/petrol many times.

Ideally I’d have a second setup in the house for computers/lights but that would probably cost about $4-5000 once all is said and done.

I only played Forza on the weekends but both times my co-workers happened to drop by. One was very interested in the game. They other was more interested in petting our Shi Tzu / Maltese mix dog as he is so different than the stand village dogs they have here. I did have to explain that I am usually a much better driver. I’ll probably capture a Trial video soon and share it with him our our shared Google Drive so he can see the difference between my laptop and the Series X. Then when I next get out to the village (March or April 2023), I will let him try his hand at driving around Mexico on the XSS. Maybe in a Toyota Hilux Land Cruiser as they are the vehicles of choice here.

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I wonder if the game crash I was getting in Riviera Sprint on the laptop is what was fixed in the latest Hotfix. I will need to download it sometime just to see if it still happens at that point. I know there was a speed zone on the west coast (La Silica) where it would also give me the error and close the game.

But even if the Hotfix gets rid of the issue, I still wouldn’t want to try to play on that laptop unless I really had no alternatives.

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Really interesting and good photos. I at least, am keen to hear more.

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I think you already know this but it’s worth mentioning just in case. The biggest issue on your laptop is a lack of VRAM. This game loves it’s RAM, of both the video and regular variety.

I suspect that laptop is supplementing VRAM by setting up virtual VRAM on the system RAM. If the graphics are integrated on the CPU, it would be a cheap, effecient solution. Unfortunately, while that’s good enough for video applications, it’s not good enough for gaming.

What’s happening is as you’re racing, the computer can’t allocate enough virtual VRAM in an effective enough manner, forcing the game to run out of VRAM and shut down.

Ensuring your settings are as low as possible (especially textures) may help, but it also could be an unsolvable problem. The laptop was never meant to be gamed on, and probably would never handle anything more graphics intensive than CS or Dota. All pretty much moot since you’ve already gotten yourself the series S anyways.

Assuming power doesn’t become an issue, your next hurdle is likely to become packet loss. Packet loss is common with mobile/remote solutions. In game, this will appear as other cars suddenly teleporting. I know you want the points from the trial, but you might be better off avoiding the trial unless you absolutely need the points or the prize. Play in offline mode whenever possible, it will still save your playlist progress online, it’ll just make the experience more palatable.

Some tips for playlist completion on terrible internet:

Championships other than the trial can be completed in offline mode.

PR stunts, treasure hunts, the weekly challenge, and photo challenges can also be completed in offline mode.

Playground games only needs to be participated in for playlist completion. Winning/losing does not matter. As long as you stick around until the end, you’ll get the prize and the playlist points.

Sometimes, you won’t connect to the servers right away and be dumped onto a generic playlist. Just leave the festival and wait a few moments, then check to see if the standard playlist is activated. This can happen even while in offline mode.

This might have been all stuff you already knew, but hey, I figured why not throw it out there.

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I was already aware of all of that but thanks. I knew going in the various shortfalls of my laptop. A few years ago I had a more powerful gaming laptop but I gave it to my son because it just consumed way too much power and was too heavy for traveling. But it was better than nothing. And the Trial was the more sure way to get points quickly with the number of errors I was getting across the map.

My company’s fiber connection was down Friday morning to Sunday afternoon (the ‘company town’ uses it for their primary connection) so once it was restored I finally got around to downloading the updates and hotfix for the PC. Drove out of my home in Playa Azul and immediately got the same memory write error. So I will just uninstall it from the laptop now that I am getting a Series S and 15.6-inch portable screen for travel and trips to the remote village.

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I wish you the very best of luck.

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