Hi,
I’m going to buy new laptop with quite poor graphics card GeForce GTX 940MX with DDR3 memory.
Will I be able to run Grim Dawn smoothly with medium settings and 1080p or at least 900p resolution?
Laptop specs:
i5 7200U, 12GB DDR4, GTX 940MX 4GB DDR3
Just looked up the 940M, sounds like it will have a hard time running anything at 1080p. You probably need at least 950M/960M for that.
That being said, GD is strongly CPU bound, so get a CPU with a high MHz rate (number of cores etc is less relevant for it). Not sure what other i5s are out there, but something to keep in mind when deciding on a CPU.
The 7th vs 6th gen chips gain you nothing at all, so no need to go with 7th. imo you should go with i5-6287u because of that, almost same price, but higher speed.
You can probably run decent settings on a lower resolution. As mamba said the game is highly cpu bound, and gpu doesn’t make much of a difference. I have half the settings down on low/medium on my GTX1080 at 2560x1600 even with a 4ghz hexacore cpu, simply because the engine itself relies a ton of cpu and struggles heavily at high resolutions.
1600x900 should be easier than on cpu than 1920x1080 simply because it requires drawing only 75% of the pixels. So a cpu with high turbo clocks would be very beneficial.
I can run everything at max with 1440p res. The 1080gtx was a big performance boost over my last gpu gtx690. So I’m not sure why your rig struggles so much with the game. My cpu is lower rated too @3.4.
given that low vs high for most settings makes no FPS difference whatsoever, I am not so sure he is struggling more than you are, other than being on a higher res 
My problem is mostly in ultimate in some areas, and crucible which gets extremely slow in the higher waves, even with lighting on low I get occasional slowdowns to like 35-40fps (with frame drops) which can be detrimental. I can also run the game at max settings for the most part and get a constant 60fps (vsync on), but theres certain areas that are highly problematic and see drops as low 25-30fps with massive frame time jumps. There’s also certain things that seem to be more likely to cause it, like say a whole bunch of undead coming out of the ground at the same time when you’re in the midst of a fight, or attacks that pass through hitting a whole screen of monsters, which both can probably be categorized as “events that require a lot of simultaneous calculations”.
I had a GTX780 prior to the 1080 and gpu made no difference at all, other than maybe slightly less load. It could be something to do with having a Sandy Bridge E cpu since they’ve definitely improved IPC over the last 3 or so generations. From what I can gather most of the effects/etc are calculated on the cpu on a single core, so all it might take is a little bit to push it over the edge, and delays occur at 100% utilization, and this throws the frame times into disarray.
While I might seem like I’m complaining, Crate have done a good job at improving things from how Titan Quest was, which would simply just hang for many seconds at a time and drop every frame iirc, when the engine couldn’t keep up. I’m sure there’s a lot more Crate guys would like to do to improve performance for everybody, but when their hands are tied due to engine limitations I’m sure it frustrates them even more than the players.
Things that really improve the frame rate consistency for me are lighting (low), reflections (low), weather (low), shadows (high) and turning off display damage (?? I guess it turns out that drawing screens full of text every time damage ticks over is pretty expensive, even more so for a screen full of DoTs).
Well, I ran the game quite a while on a 6200U and a 940M, with everything on high (except lighting: low) and no AA/AF it produced 50+fps most of the time @1080p, except for, as already stated, CPU heavy situations. There even my 6900K went down to a crawl @1080 with lighting on high.
(worst scene so far: Valbury pre-gate, lower left farm road, as a summoner, with 5 perma pets + primal instinct + invocation of chaos, several elemental storm and meteor shower procs (shower on invocation), masses of aether undead and vanguards, a terraformer, and so on… all ticking in aetherfire whirls, elemental storms, poison bomb pools and vines… min of 18 fps on 6900k with gtx1080)
So you should be able to enjoy it on slightly reduced settings quite nicely. And maybe try to skip multiple AoE DoT procs on pets as a summoner.