Mass Effect Legendary Edition doesn't need a whole lot of graphics processing power to shine, but it seems it can run in trouble on laptops. I've recently been benchmarking the classic space roleplaying game on a variety of machines and been impressed by the performance on offer. At least I was until I got to the MSI laptops we use for testing. Both of them ran the remake of Bioware's classic like an absolute dog.
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The GE76 Raider lays claim to a GeForce RTX 3070, while the GF65 Thin has a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to call its own. Even so, both machines produced sluggish performance below 20fps by default.
This is because both machines were defaulting to the Intel integrated graphics for the rendering duties and not the Nvidia silicon.
The solution is fairly straightforward: open up the Nvidia Control Panel by right-clicking on the desktop and then setting the Preferred graphics processor to High-performance Nvidia processor in the drop-down list. By default, it's set as Auto-detect, which generally switches to the discrete GPU when needed, although clearly not here.
Once done, you should see far healthier framerates. In this case, Mass Effect Legendary Edition jumped up to 116fps on the GTX 1660 Ti-powered MSI GF65 Thin and up to 173fps on the MSI GE76 Raider. A tweak definitely worth doing, and something worth keeping an eye out for in the future.
