GADGET GURU
T3’s techno whizzkid downloads himself to our eyeballs once more
Graphics this sophisticated require serious processing power
ILLUSTRATIONS: STEPHEN KELLY
Q IVY WEST, BIGGLESWADE Can I play heavyweight PC games on my laptop?
A Write-your-own Guru fans will likely have already imagined a sentence like ‘depends on your laptop, idiot’ by now. But it is you who is the idiot, idiot: it doesn’t depend on your laptop as much as it depends on the big heat-slinging main PC that’s tucked away in your office. If that can run them, your laptop can do it, albeit with the teensiest of caveats.
Guru has been running Parsec (free) for some time now, which offers an easy, low-lag way to bring up one computer onto another; you might try something similar Steam Link, or Nvidia’s Moonlight, or an elaborate contraption made of cables and mirrors. The problem is that low-lag does not equal no-lag. For certain games this won’t make a difference, but for others it’ll absolutely ruin their twitchy action, and it might crunch up the picture too. To get the best experience connect via wires where you can – this reduces both the natural input lag of Bluetooth controllers and the still-crap nature of Wi-Fi.
Your phone, your tablet, even your smart TV could be perfectly capable of piping your PC wherever you might want it
The best thing about this kind of digital tomfoolery is that it isn’t only restricted to pulling off virtual telepresence through your laptop. Your phone, your tablet, even your smart TV could be perfectly capable of piping your PC wherever you might want it. If you can hook up a controller, you’re golden. It’s one of the things Guru looks forward to doing on the Steam Deck he’ll be waiting a year to get: while there’s plenty of grunt on the device itself, potentially porting into his desktop for the really meaty stuff is quite the proposition.