I am running a Dell XPS 15, it has a Razer Chroma X with RTX4070. I have just upgraded from the 1070.
The performance has marginally increased so I am thinking it must be the overall processing power. Anything I can do to improve it? Or is the Laptop just not cutting it along with the 40mb thunderbolt video?
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Is this in general or with NMS in particular?
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Depends on the CPU. An RTX 4070 is a big jump from a 1070 especially if talking about mobile architecture. If you are trying to run at 4k and over 60fps this might be why you are seeing no improvements, cpu could be the bottleneck. If your cpu was paired with the 1070 out of the box though as a dell pre package (i assume thats what XPS 15 means) then it should have no problem handling anything the RTX throws at it as long as it is 1080 and between 30/60 fps.
Also try experimenting with DSLS if you have an RTX card, the lower the res you run that at though the more artifacting in movement between foreground/background objects.
Basically the 4070 will allow you to run all the bells and whistles, all the ray tracing it can handle, textures as high as you can go (just make sure youve got a ssd that can stream textures quick enough or you get blurry placeholders and pop in, if so drop texture settings down again) but the resolutions and frame rate will cripple yr cpu and mobo if they’re not up to par.
Drop the res and frame rate down and see if you notice an improvement with performance.
If you can get back to us with more information on ram and cpu someone who actually knows what they’re talking about might be able to help you troubleshoot more. I’m just a regular moron 
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I don’t know anything about Dell. I have avoided them since I discovered that I couldn’t repair a Dell desktop, because they (like Compaq, and several others), had deliberately altered the industry standard architecture to make it impossible to fit generic PC parts.
I do know that when I fitted a GTX 1080 to my old computer, I didn’t get the performance increases I had hoped for - and the bottleneck turned out to be the speed of the main system memory.
I have a motherboard here (not in use) that has a socket for an M2 SSD - potentially very fast - but if you use it, it grabs half the bus bandwidth that would otherwise be available to the graphics card. It’s counter intuitive, but for graphics-heavy applications, that system is actually made faster by using a slower SATA SSD.
Sorry to say it, and I know it doesn’t help your case, but system optimisation is something of a black art.
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It’s a long time ago since I had a Dell XP model, and I vowed never to have one again. The design of the thing was just horrible. It had great specs, but it scrounged on the supporting hardware to actually make it useful. Way too much power cramped into too small a space with insufficient cooling.
Over all, I’ve had bad experiences with almost any piece of Dell hardware except monitors. I remember it starting somewhen back in the 2000s when a friend asked me if I could install a new operating system on his Dell desktop and I couldn’t, because the bloody OS license was hard-locked in the Bios and it wouldn’t boot with another OS. I have developed the habit of muttering “ah hell, it’s a dell” whenever I see one of their machines.
Sorry, I’m aware this wasn’t helpful…
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Sorry, I have nothing to contribute to the topic.
My only Dell is a NetBook (Inspiron Mini 10, or so?) from 2009? I had no problems replacing the included linux with LUbuntu (lightweight Ubuntu) and it’s quiet and got super long battery life. Of course it cannot run any modern app, and not even system control panels fit on that low resolution screen, just barely a browser and text editor and some CLI dev tools. Oh and I can run Minecraft as a slideshow on lowest graphic settings by installing 8-bit textures and optifine! 
The one thing that I will warn people against is, this Dell had the worst touchpad I have ever experienced, you couldn’t click without moving the pointer…
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Back in the 1990s, Wyse (the terminal people) made a range of PCs that had no on-board BIOS access. If you needed to change BIOS settings, you had to insert a special floppy disk, and run an access program.
Wyse didn’t tell anybody about this, and the floppy disk wasn’t supplied as standard to customers. You only found out about it if you called their service department.
Nobody ever explained what you were supposed to do if your reason for accessing the BIOS was because your floppy drive wasn’t working.
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Time to rebrand as Unwyse
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This is with NMS, nothing else I have works as hard 
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NMS is a special case. Every game I have runs great. NMS runs fairly well but locks my PC up for quite a while after stopping it. My CPU is tapped out and my memory is consumed until it all clears out. Currently building a new PC with tons of memory. In the meantime, I have turned a few graphic settings back and it has helped.
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Just to add for when you get around to troubleshooting, NMS settings are very kind in letting you know which setting will effect cpu, gpu or both, so turning down a bunch of stuff that might be throttling your dells cpu would be a good start. When in settings when hovering over a selection, a tooltip to the right will tell you if it uses cpu or gpu more.
NMS being a proc gen universe is very cpu dependant as its constantly writing the world in to memory instead of preloading like you could with a “baked” game. So turning down any cpu heavy process will help performance exceptionally.
Tesselation, although a graphical feature, is heavy on cpu calculations so I usually have that at lowest without turning it off entirely, and I turn world complexity somewhere in the mid range. You still see big trees as far as the horizon so it doesnt gimp draw distance, it just reduces the lod pop in to not render as far out and although its gpu when it comes to LOD cpu struggles to maintain so many props getting written in and out (not sure how it actually works, this is my laymans explanation of my vague knowledge of real time rendering)
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