Your graphics chip – or GPU – has the most say over what resolution you can play with and how high you can push that detail. Plastic chassis that roll in on the wrong side of $1,000 feels like a rum deal, especially when it comes in at a shade under an inch thick.If you want to splurge on any single component, this is the place to do it. This isn't helped by the fact that it doesn't feel like a premium slice of hardware.

This makes the MSI Pulse GL66 a tough laptop to recommend to PC gamers because once you've dropped a grand on a gaming laptop, there's nothing guaranteed to give you buyers remorse more than your favorite games causing it to crash, or not run at anything like reasonable settings. Metro Exodus did crash a few times when testing though, which again is possibly down to the lack of VRAM. This is with DLSS helping to ease things out, but that's one of the biggest selling points of this generation of GPUs, and it's particularly useful for budget GPUs. Even a demanding title like Metro Exodus manages a reasonably 42fps, which is with the RTX pretties flicked on. Still, at least you can actually play the game.Įlsewhere, the performance from the RTX 3050 Ti really isn't bad. It still looks good enough, although obviously not as good as what the higher settings are capable of. With the game optimizing the settings itself (basically dropping most of them down to Low) it manages 63fps on average, with minimums of 16fps. Horizon Zero Dawn also unceremoniously crashes the whole machine when you try running it at the highest settings. With only 4GB of RAM, that's not going to be the case, and indeed I had problems with our current testing suite. You want to know that whatever machine you buy today is going to be still relevant when it comes to the games that are released next year, and potentially the year after that. If you're buying a new gaming laptop, then you're buying for the future, not just for the games that are out right now. This GPU only has 4GB of memory to call its own, which is really pushing what modern games can run with, even at more modest settings. The problem with the RTX 3050 Ti is not the underlying power, which as you'll see shortly is surprisingly capable, but rather that the lack of VRAM stops this laptop from being able to play the latest games. Although, this may not be the budget dream you'd want.

MSI has squeezed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti in alongside that potentially-powerful CPU, which is a GPU we haven't, as yet, seen grace our desktop machines, even though there is definitely a hunger for more affordable graphics cards right now. This is where the MSI Pulse GL66 comes unstuck, although not necessarily for the reason you may first think. The other part of the performance equation is, of course, the GPU.

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