“Can Shadow PC’s Power Upgrade run Star Citizen? I spent £45 to find out whether performance is any good!”
The author explores the performance of Shadow PC’s power upgrade for playing Star Citizen in the cloud. They note that the power upgrade offers a faster CPU, GPU, and more RAM compared to the base model. However, they experienced issues with the launcher and had to enter safe mode for it to load properly. The machine runs on Windows 10 (upgradeable to Windows 11) with four cores and eight threads. The gaming graphics card, RTX A4500, is not ideal but still functional.
In terms of performance, the author found that in space, the game runs at around 50 FPS, and quantum travel is not too demanding on the CPU. However, performance dips significantly in cities, especially on the rooftop of Orison, where they achieved a playable 29 FPS. Going further into the city, frame rates dropped below 20 FPS, making it unplayable. The GPU was not significantly challenged throughout the testing, indicating that the CPU was the bottleneck.
The author also faced a recurring issue where the Shadow PC would crash after about five minutes of gameplay, except for one instance where they managed a continuous 20-minute gameplay session. While they couldn’t determine the cause of the crashes, they acknowledged that it could be a unique problem. Overall, despite the power upgrade, the author concludes that the performance of Shadow PC for Star Citizen remains similar to that of the base model, making it unsuitable for smooth gameplay.