Gaming experience: Overwatch & Heroes of the Storm

Overwatch

It’s to Blizzard Entertainment’s credit that Overwatch is an amazingly well-optimized game. There was little need to sacrifice graphics for performance on the FX504 because, even on High, this multiplayer shooter was running at a solid 65+ FPS, even when you are in the thick of it tossing Moira’s purple balls of doom.

A particularly busy moment in the game was when the team was contesting a point on the control map, Oasis. Both sides were on the objective and despite justice raining from above and comments about the time of day by McCree, our team was able to put the opposition down thanks to some timely heals as Moira. Not once within that confusing melee were there any frustrating slowdowns.

There isn't much else to say except that if you have a solid internet connection, you can expect the best of both worlds here – graphics and performance. Now that's what we call having your cake and eating it.

Heroes of the Storm

Unfortunately, Heroes of the Storm didn’t get the same optimization treatment as Overwatch did. We don't have the same luxury of running HotS on a higher setting without losing some FPS. That is not to say that the battle arena game can't run on High, but you’ll be looking at around 40+ FPS instead of the smoother 60 FPS on Medium settings. These figures are pretty decent and certainly serviceable with respect to the affordable class of gaming notebooks we're dealing with and still holding on to the notebook's native Full HD resolution.

Our in-game settings recommendation

With team coordination, positioning, and skill shots being such key components of this game, those extra frames make quite the difference. We found this to be especially true in a game as Jaina Proudmoore, a ranged assassin hero. It felt more responsive when tossing out those critical skill shots and area of effect abilities. Landing those nice kills allowed the team to push all the way to the Nexus, ending the game with cold efficiency.