Will it run on a Microsoft Surface? Painkiller: Black Edition

I had a question to ask myself today, can my Surface Pro 4 run games? Today, I'm trying to run 'Painkiller: Black Edition'; because I miss the soundtrack. Also, it was an incredible game where all you needed to do to succeed was kill everything
that moved.

The Machine

There's a few problems with the concept of running games on a Surface. The biggest of these that I can forsee is the bizzare native resolution of the screen, 2736x1824. Hopefully the game works out of the digital box without too much trouble.

Let's start with the specs of the machine we're running on:

• Intel Core i5 6300U CPU (2.4GHz)
• 8GB of RAM (DDR3)
• Intel HD Graphics 520
• 256GB SSD
• Native Resolution of 2736x1824
• Windows 10 Pro x64

The Game

Painkiller pits you against the armies of hell, and you have a truly inspiring and original arsenal of weaponry. There is the titular painkiller, a spinning device that is essentially a blender without any protective restraints. You can also shoot spinning death balls with this weapon, that will mince up your foes. There's the typical shotgun, a stakegun, and the shuriken gun that as zero punctuation once said 'it shoots shurikens and lightning'.

As you rack up the body count, you collect the souls of the fallen. When you collect about 66 souls, you transform into some sort of powerful demon, which lets you BFG-Gun style, in black and white; proceed through the largest hordes and most powerful bosses with ease. You also collect secrets, gold and armor, but the game has little to do with narrative during levels. It is all about killing everything that moves as quickly as possible.

Painkiller: Black Edition satisfied my nostalgia trip, and all of the wanton violence involving killing demons is backed by an incredible industrial metal soundtrack that suits the setting perfectly. The story proceeds at the end of each act, with FMVs that have aged very poorly in comparison to the game engine.

Framerates

Painkiller loads and runs fine. In fact, I put all the settings to max, and it even appears to natively support the Surface's bizzare native resolution. At this, the FPS range during combat is between 30-75 FPS. Very playable.

Drop it down to 1080p (and accept letterboxing on the screen) and the FPS shoots up to well above 150. Given the screen only supports 60Hz, this is a waste, so turning on a frame rate liiter via the console reduces tearing which I observed occuring throughout gameplay at high FPS at 1080p.

The game runs wonderfully, and is very responsive. I found the sweet spot to be the maximum settings at the native reoslution (2736x1824) Even in the largest levels (Cathedral) framerate drops to about 30fps (some dips to 23!) were caused by the particle effects upon enemy death, when you were really up close and personal with them.

It is remarkable that I can run a game that is fairly intensive graphically, with a dozen or more foes on the screen at once, an a integrated GPU. I know the technology has come a long way in 13 years, but the game still looks up to scratch, due to the fact that it doesn't ground itself in realism, but well and truly grounds itself in 'you must kill everything that moves'.

TLDR

Painkiller should run on anything. If it can run on my Surface Pro and be playable at a resolution above 1080p, then you too can run it, even if you've got a shitty computer. Painkiller is one of those games that the PC Master Race is all about.

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I am of the firm belief that this Surface may be an viable gaming platform for (older) games!