I don't want another piece of hardware. I don't want the clutter. I don't want the probably real if not giant extra expense. But I do want stuff to work.
I got the guts of the Fanatec CSR dedusted, and while the whole system appears a little unstable (meaning I get various results from each cycle, and it sometimes doesn't seem to load the drivers correctly), I did finally manage to play with my Project Cars 2 demo a little bit.
It was like driving in a strobe room. I mean, not literally flashing, just super-low frame rate. I didn't look for a number, but I'd honestly guess 10-15 fps. Which shouldn't be shocking, as I'm using a Thinkpad T580 with onboard Intel graphics (620 UHD?)... So, with an eye toward not cluttering up the office (further) or buying a whole additional computer, I searched briefly to see whether such a thing as an external video card upgrade exists, and I guess they do, using this Thunderbolt 3 port... I think.
I don't know how into this I'll get, but I do know that I feel silly sitting here with a Fanatec wheel and pedals and no machine capable of running a driving sim in a reasonable fashion. I *think* my end goal is probably to do iRacing, as "practice" is probably the best description of what I want out of it, but I'm guessing that even if iRacing's graphics are less demanding, this was so bad as to be unusable, and that's not likely to change. I'll download iRacing just to see whether it's magically better, but let's assume for now I'm going to need a real graphics card.
With all that preamble, anybody have any experience with an external card? Recommendations for a basic PC with enough card for that not to be the limiter?
Oh, and as long as I'm making upgrades, I'm pretty sure being VR-capable is something I'd regret not doing from here...
