LotRO on Surface 3 Round 2

After the mixed results of my first experiment in running Lord of the Rings Online on Surface 3, I decided to give another try. This time, I installed the game on a memory card and used a wireless Bluetooth mouse instead of a wired laser mouse. I used recommended settings for my system (Very Low).

For the test, I did some questing in West Rohan. Without the power drain from external devices, Surface was able to run the game without crashes. With the low settings the game looks bad, but the frame rate is unstable. Out in the wilderness on in interior spaces Surface can reach over 30 frames per second, but with more characters or visual effects frame rate drops below 10 per second

In conclusion, Surface 3 can run LotRO. Unfortunately, due the low power of the hardware the game is not fun to play and in will eat a considerable amount of the limited internal storage or memory card. To fully enjoy the game a more powerful machine is strongly recommended.

[THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE™ interactive video game © 2015 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.]

2 Comments

  1. Giancarlo says:

    I was curious about one thing, what resolution did you use to play the game? I’m thinking maybe if you lower the resolution you may be able to get better performance? From the images it looks like you were probably running in a Full HD resolution?

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    1. I used the native resolution of Surface 3 (1920×1280) or my external display (1920×1200). I have not done any experiments with different resolutions, but lower resolution could be a viable option. Especially, when playing on the small display of the device itself.

      Another thing I am planning to try is tweaking power saving options to prevent Surface from throttling down too aggressively.

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