http://imgur.com/R2LRApf
http://imgur.com/B1fyIdN
Hey Shalom. Thanks for the compliment, I appreciate it. I thought you'd appreciate the screen shot that I took in your honor. My display has a resolution of 3440 x 1440, so this is how Syndicate looks to me. I also had a screen shot of GTA5 that I took over last weekend, so I included it as well. Because of your post, I JUST updated Syndicate now. Unfortunately I don't have it on Steam. I got the game for free with my new Samsung 950 Pro SSD. It's crappie that it was Ubisoft's Uplay code and not Steam, but I can't complain too much since it was free.
The game looks just beautiful, but I will say that when I attempted to play it on one 980 Ti, I experienced input lag, which I find annoying. I noticed the lag from the day that I installed it, about 7-10 days ago. I had one of my GPU's out because my Intel 750 takes up one of my 3 PCIe3 x16 slots, and the Samsung 950 Pro uses a M.2 slot, which when occupied, disables one of my other PCIe3 x16 slots. So now I have to decide if I'm keeping both SSDs, which would require a motherboard upgrade, or sell one of the SSDs. I'm obviously not going to return a GPU. Like I was saying, I think this is a beautiful game, and it appears to be stable so far, but not optimized. Normally I don't have to be too concerned about performance, or lack of, on my setup, but with Syndicate I do. I know that 3440 x 1440 is a reasonably high resolution, but I never experienced noticeable input lag on any of my other 30 titles. But it's typical Ubisoft in my opinion. This is not saying anything bad at the Assassin's Creed series, but Ubisoft in particular, will always release this series year-after-year, no matter what the quality level is. Unity was clear and irrefutable proof of that.
Shalom, please don't forget to watch that performance review. It's by Joker Productions; he's a guy that I mod for and he has amazing unbiased reviews. By the way, the fact that Syndicate lists a 6 GB minimum and a 8 GB recommended, tells me that you should eventually get this laptop upgraded to that level, if it can be upgraded. I don't know what mfg or model of laptop it is, but I find that many laptops with ultra low voltage processors have memory soldered onto the motherboard and can't be upgraded. Hopefully in this case, I'm wrong. By the way, this game does take a while to load for me too, although not THAT long. You could always upgrade to a Samsung 850 EVO SSD to remedy that.
In reference to your question about GPU / CPU usage & temps, you could download HWMonitor. Everyone has their favorite tools: HWMonitor, or MSI afterburner, or EVGA Precision, etc.
By the way, you have a much MUCH better laptop than mine. My laptop is a Lenovo X230, which is a business laptop. It relies on HD4000 integrated Intel graphics, and until just this year was my primary computer hooked up to two 1920 x 1200 Dell Ultrasharp monitors. At the time, I would have killed to have your laptop, as mine could only play games with rudimentary graphics. Then at the beginning of this year, I built my PC. One of the things that I really respect about Rockstar is that they made the PC port of GTA5 work with just about any hardware there is. I've met people online who have computers that are so incredibly old and still play GTA. It's good business because it means they can sell the title to practically anyone that has a functioning PC.
One other random thought: I saw your comment about installing this game off DVD. It's funny because my first game for the PC this year was Witcher 3. I bought the game on disc because I was being very ol' school and had never used Steam. Then when I initially got my GTX 970, it came with a free Steam code for Batman Arkham Knight. Horrible game, but when I saw the convenience of Steam installations, I never looked back.
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