My daughter spilled liquid on my laptop.

I went with the Asus Vivobook X1500EA.
16gb ram, decent cpu, good webcam, all that matters really. Not sure how well it runs ZK. You can probably find something cheaper with similar specs if you look

You can spend anywhere from a few $100 to a few $1000 on a laptop, so that makes a big difference.

Personally I have a soft-spot for AMD-based laptops. They have better power efficiency and better bang for buck with integrated graphics, and also have a proper bundled GPU driver on Linux (although, it's not necessarily as good quality as Nvidia, YMMV).

NOTE: I'm NOT running on Linux currently, I've found in general it's just that little bit too much extra hassle on laptops. I can recommend WSL if you can deal with Windows/Linux mix.

I switched to my internal GPU, AMD 780M, and did a couple of tests running a 10v10 replay. Figures from the start of the game, so they will only get worse.

- 1080p resolution, high settings - 20fps
- 1080p resolution, medium settings - 45fps
- 1080p resolution, low settings - 100fps
- 4K resolution, high settings - 10fps

If it's in your range, something like https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/new-inspiron-16-laptop/spd/inspiron-16-5645-laptop/cn56403sc might be alright. £700 here in the UK for an AMD 8840U, I'm confident it has enough in the CPU: I have 7940HS, which is a little faster than the 8840U, but as you see it can push 100fps at least. For the iGPU the 8840U packs a 760M which I believe is about 2/3 of the 780M, so you talking about peaking at 30fps with 1080p/medium and it will drop off as the amount onscreen increases. You might find you have to reduce the resolution and/or graphics settings from that to sustain a decent frame rate.

If you want to push 4K at high settings then you're talking about needing a top-end Nvidia mobile GPU - interestingly this does seem to have improved recently, it seems in 4K/high I can stay comfortably above 30fps on a 4070, whereas it used to be sketchier.

linux/steam

dell precision 5570

Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz
CPU MHz: 2300.000
CPU max MHz: 5100,0000 <= maxspeed is what you want

nvidia Quadro T1000 GPU

120 FPS / 1080p on low setting

to expand on what Malric said...
you should definitely avoid Apple laptops. They are notoriously hard to repair and are some of the most fragile laptops ever produced. Only incentive for buying one is the M1/2/3 processors, but newer Intel laptop cpus have them beat in almost every category for a much cheaper price (not that it's really relevant for laptops as long as the cpu is reasonable). I recommend against getting laptops with dedicated GPUs especially for Linux. And to be honest, Zero-K doesn't really need it.

Nowadays both AMD and Intel iGPUs are similar in performance, AMD used to be a lot better but now it's not really worth comparing.

quote: Wrong.

The provided link does not discuss at all any of the Intel GPU-s. It might be the case that the AMD ones are better (would make sense Intel was not great at this domain), but if you compare AMD with 5 years old Nvidia you cannot conclude automatically that they are better than current day Intel iGPU...

quote: However, I have no idea if ZK or Spring/Recoil engine has any native support for ARM.

As far as I know, it does not. It does not have support for Mac OS either (although people have tried).

I had ATI (bought at some point by AMD) >10 years ago. I would still avoid it for the same price if performance is not worse than 50% because of the headaches I had with the driver. No matter how well the benchmark and price look I care also about actually using it.

quote: Intel CPUs will never be able to stay on for up to a few days without charging. The Apple M-series products are simply the best option when it comes performance-per-watt efficiency, which is a very important metric for laptops as they are supposed to be portable.

Speak for yourself. I don't look for more than about 6 hours of battery life. I buy thick laptops (gamer or workstation) and don't care much about top performance per watt because I have a lot of watts.

Such a laptop runs ZK without approaching any thermal limit, I recommend it.

The story with GPU drivers is clouded on Linux depending on how you feel about open source:

- For AMD the open source amdgpu driver is part of the kernel so it's less hassle, and should just work out of the box
- For nVidia there is an (or two?) open source driver which isn't so good, significantly worse than amdgpu in performance, features and stability
- For nVidia there is also a closed source driver which is the best quality Linux driver out there, but it's closed source with all that comes with that
- I'm not sure how Intel's driver is these days but when I used it in the past I'd rate it like amdgpu (i.e. pretty good, not the best)

Because of the above you may feel like AMD (or Intel) have done more for the open source community, whereas nVidia don't appear to have contributed quite as much.

I think it's true that Intel iGPU is much closer to AMD iGPU these days. Indeed, it looks like the very best ones now trade blows with AMD: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21282/intel-core-ultra-7-115h-review-meteor-lake-makes-makes-fresh-start-to-mobile-cpus/8
Even then I think the AMD iGPU comes out on top more often than not, and bear in mind that's a brand new Intel iGPU.

Personally, if you're going with iGPU I think AMD is the better choice - the drivers are good enough and frame rate matters. If you want a discreet GPU then I'd take nVidia, and the CPU choice doesn't matter so much.

Amnykon - would be great to hear an idea of budget!

P.S. There's no Apple silicon native build of Spring/ZK. Whilst that's some amazing tech, and AMD/Intel have been left in the dust a bit for performance/efficiency, that ecosystem is fairly toxic to PC gaming. You can basically forget Steam. I really wanted to buy a Mac for my last laptop, but that put it out of the picture for me.

To be fair the closed source nVidia driver isn't just a philosophical thing. It's slightly fiddlier to install and keep up to date - but that's not really a problem either.

I think there's no question that nVidia's driver has fewer problems on both Linux and Windows, but I'd say AMD is "good enough" these days, even for ZK.