It doesn't take much graphics processing power to make Mass Effect Legendary Edition shine, but it seems that laptops can cause problems. I recently benchmarked this classic space role-playing game on a variety of machines and was impressed with its performance. At least, that was the case until I got to the MSI laptop I was using for testing. Both ran Bioware's remake of the classic like a dog.

The GE76 Raider is equipped with a GeForce RTX 3070 and the GF65 Thin with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. Still, both machines performed sluggishly at less than 20 fps by default.

This is because both machines defaulted their rendering duties to Intel's integrated graphics rather than Nvidia's silicon. [Right-click on the desktop to open the "Nvidia Control Panel" and set "Preferred graphics processor" to "High-performance Nvidia processor" in the drop-down list. By default, it is set to Auto-detect, which usually switches to a discrete GPU when needed, but obviously not here.

Doing so should result in a much higher frame rate. In this case, Mass Effect Legendary Edition jumped to 116 fps on the MSI GF65 Thin with GTX 1660 Ti and 173 fps on the MSI GE76 Raider. This tweak is definitely worth implementing and something to keep an eye on in the future.