HP Spectre x360 Convertible 15t
i7 9750H CPU
GTX 1650 Max-Q 4GB
16GB DDR4
500GB Samsung SSD
Target Performance: 60FPS at 1080p - ACHIEVED!
—D2R game settings—
Display Mode: Fullscreen
Game Visual Settings: 1080p Resolution
Resolution Scale: 100%
Sharpening: 25
Brightness: Just set it to make the image barely visible
Veritical Sync - ON (I have a 60Hz OLED monitor refresh, so 60 FPS cap)
Graphic Presets: Custom
Texture Quality: Very High
Antistrophic Filtering 1x
Ambient Occulusion Quality: Low
Character Detail: Very High
Environment Detail: Low (This setting has the biggest affect on system performance IMO; it draws the grass and other details on the terrain. I still thought the game looked great without that stuff on, but to each his own. The ground is still tessellated and looks fine to me with it on Low.)
Transparency Quality: Very High
Shadow Quality: Low (I didn’t notice much difference at all with shadow quality on high or low to be honest, so I kept this low. Shadows still looked awesome in the tombs on Low.)
Anti-Aliasing: FXAA (At 1080p on a 15" OLED monitor, FXAA is perfectly fine. Jaggies were gone.)
Dynamic Resolution Scaling: Unavailable (I suspect this might be reserved for DLSS or FSR on the newer GPUs? It wasn’t available for me on my GTX)
VFX Lighting Quality: High (This setting has the second highest affect on the game performance IMO, but I was able to get it to High with the changes below)
To finally stop the constant crashes to desktop, I had to go under the hood of my laptop to do two things: stop the sudden temperature spikes when the game is loading areas and lots of lightning/cold FX were popping off in the game, and to get my CPU and GPU fans running at lower thresholds to prevent critical temp thermal throttles. That’s ultimately what causes the crashes to desktop for me, although I had temp spikes and a couple crashes when just standing idle in town in solo games as well. Has to be some sort of game issue there.
Anyway, I used TWO programs for this: Throttlestop and Notebook Fan Control
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Throttlestop: I had to do a -250mhz CPU Core undervolt and a -116mhz CPU Cache undervolt. In addition to that, I lowered the boost clock from 4.5GHZ to 4.0GHZ, cascading down to 3.5GHZ when all 6/12 cores were active.
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Notebook Fan Control (NBFC): This has to do more with my HP Spectre’s annoying fan controls, so if you have a legit high-end gaming laptop or desktop PC, you probably got better fan controls and can skip this. My laptop is more of a mid-range laptop. I had to set my critical thermal temp to 75C with NBFC, wherein the fans would kick on to 100% speed at 75C, and then maintain 85% speed the rest of the way. Doing that kept my max CPU and GPU temps mostly under 80C and edged off the sudden temp spikes. Testing in game for a while, Max temp on CPU was 81C and max temp on GPU was 74C, which for a skinny laptop like mine is pretty good.
Keep in mind, without ANY of these measures, my CPU temps were spiking to 97C, GPU was hitting 90C. I even hit TJMAXX once forcing a system reboot.
So yea, the game runs smooth now for me taking these pretty extreme measures. I hope Blizzard can smooth this game out a little bit before launch next month. If anything, I learned a lot more about my laptop this weekend!
NOTE: don’t do any of the above unless you know what you’re doing!