Gaming capabilities and general performance.

Edit: TL;DR check the list at the bottom for all tested games and their frame rates.

I had trouble finding any information about people testing games on the UP board, so I thought I'd share what I've found so far.

I have a 4/32 UP board and have installed Windows 10 Pro and the basic things I need for regular use, leaving me with about 8GB storage remaining.

For expansion, I am currently using an external HDD connected to the the USB 3.0 port, I experience hitching in most games and put this down to the transfer speed of the HDD. I will be replacing this with an SSD and expect this to solve the problem.
Edit: the SSD did solve the hitching problem and I now experience no difficulties at all

I'm also using a small fan on top of the otherwise passive heatsink (edit: currently connected to a 5v and ground gp-bus pins on the board. If anyone knows where I can get a small header for the USB pins where the heatsink fan is supposed to go. Please let me know. It's fine where it is, but the fan stays on even when shutdown, until unplugged.) , this has dropped temps from a toasty 53-Celsius while idling to a somewhat more palatable 42c. this doesn't seem to fluctuate much even while gaming, so it may not be required, but I do like the temp reduction anyway so mine is staying.

(Edit: One problem I did have during set up was a lack of HDMI sound output, this was fixed by downloading the win10 drivers from the downloads section on this site.)

Note: I will update this as I test more games:
Diablo 3, runs at 15-20fps.
Hearthstone runs fine on max settings. Edit: after using Fraps, I see that it runs at a consistent 30 fps on max settings, while this may seem low for such a basic game, there is no movement on screen most of the time, and it is turn-based so it would be difficult to tell between this and higher frame rates. I believe it may actually be capped at 30 fps.

Bioshock plays at a very palatable 40-70fps on low settings and texture resolution turned up high, if you don't mind playing at 30fps you can turn on some of the other effects like lighting/shadows/anti-aliasing, although, with all of them on, you'll be in the 20fps range.

Some games that played flawlessly on any settings, FTL, Hotline Miami, Half-Life, Half-Life: Source, Half-Life 2.
Although untested, I imagine any pixel art indie games will run fine on high settings, and the old source engine games like CS:GO and Portal 1/2.

Torchlight plays at 20-30 FPS on full settings, but if you just turn Antialiasing off then it goes up to 30-40 Fps, and you can easily hit 60fps and beyond if you continued turning down.

Reassembly, one of my favorite games of all time runs smoothly at default settings, around 30-45 fps, but it can go down to around 25 when there is a lot going on. However, even when this happens, reassembly seems to go into slow motion to compensate, rather than dropping frames, which can be annoying as it takes a long time to do everything, but it is cool that it still looks nice, even at low fps.

Borderlands is just about playable at 25-35fps, 1024X600 resolution, not the smoothest experience, but definitely worth it for the gameplay if you can put up with it.

PS1 emulator "epsxe" runs at solid 60fps. This is presumably true for emulators for all consoles of that era and previous.


I will continue to add to this list but hopefully this gives you a pretty accurate idea of what to expect in terms of gaming performance.


Here is a list of games and their frame rates, which I will keep updated. Let me know if you get different numbers.
I tested a lot of these in high, medium and low settings. Unlike above, all that will be listed here is the best overall experience according to my tastes, for example, if a game played at 60 fps on medium texture resolution, but I preferred how it looked at 45fps with high texture resolution, then it will be listed here as "45 fps high settings". If I personally preferred it with the higher frame rate, it will be listed as "60fps medium settings", this will take into account things like the amount of image movement.
Also, most of these games were tested on a 1080p monitor at the game's native resolution.


Anarchy Arcade: 60 fps
BioShock: 50fps on medium settings
Borderlands: 30 Fps low settings
Diablo 3: 15-20fps on lowest settings
FTL: High FPS, max settings
Half life: 60fps max
Half life: Source: 100+fps max settimgs
Half life 2: 45-60 fps max settings
Hearthstone: capped at 30fps and reaches this on max settings
Hotline Miami: High fps max
Limbo: 25-30fps
Mark of the Ninja: 60 fps max
Punch Club: 60 fps max
Reassembly: 30-40fps on medium/high settings
Torchlight: 30-40 fps on high settings