Here's how you fix poor fps in Mass Effect Legendary Edition on laptops

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Left to its own devices, the latest remake may be hobbling itself unnecessarily.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition PC settings
(Image credit: BioWare)

Mass Effect Legendary Edition doesn't need a whole lot of graphics processing power to shine, but it seems it can run in trouble on laptops. I've recently been benchmarking the classic space roleplaying game on a variety of machines and been impressed by the performance on offer. At least I was until I got to the MSI laptops we use for testing. Both of them ran the remake of Bioware's classic like an absolute dog.

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(Image credit: Future)

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The GE76 Raider lays claim to a GeForce RTX 3070, while the GF65 Thin has a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti to call its own. Even so, both machines produced sluggish performance below 20fps by default. 

This is because both machines were defaulting to the Intel integrated graphics for the rendering duties and not the Nvidia silicon.

The solution is fairly straightforward: open up the Nvidia Control Panel by right-clicking on the desktop and then setting the Preferred graphics processor to High-performance Nvidia processor in the drop-down list. By default, it's set as Auto-detect, which generally switches to the discrete GPU when needed, although clearly not here.

(Image credit: Future)

Once done, you should see far healthier framerates. In this case, Mass Effect Legendary Edition jumped up to 116fps on the GTX 1660 Ti-powered MSI GF65 Thin and up to 173fps on the MSI GE76 Raider. A tweak definitely worth doing, and something worth keeping an eye out for in the future.

Alan Dexter
Alan Dexter

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.