Integrated GPUs other than Intel

[Patrol1985]

I know that compared to dedicated cards they're still crappy, but are they at least a little better than Intel's cards? For instance, can any of them run Doom 3 smoothly?

Also, what is the difference exactly between "integrated" and "dedicated"? I always thought it was about video memory (integrated cards use system memory, whereas dedicated ones have their own). However, recently I read a sale offer regarding a laptop which was described as having a "dedicated GPU", but when I read about the said chip it turned out it used system memory, not its own. Was it just the seller being a wiseguy?

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

My (now 7 years old, I recently realized) main PC has a built-in ATI Radeon HD 4200 that I would classify as "barely adequate". It runs stuff from the approximate era and newer stuff that's not too demanding (dinky indie titles and what have you). Good enough for my purposes but maybe not for yours.

As I recall, yes it did run Doom 3 playably, though I no longer have a copy to test with at the moment. I think I needed to possibly tick the more hardcore graphics options down a bit.

I can vouch for it being good enough for Mount & Blade Warband, which is probably the most demanding thing I play with any regularity.

[Bucket]

Patrol1985 said:

For instance, can any of them run Doom 3 smoothly?

Doom 3 is a decade old. It runs on a netbook.

I get that the whole selling point of PCs is cutting-edge graphics, but where did this idea that old-ass games aren't even playable come from? This is way beyond general ignorance.

[Maes]

There are no hard and fast rules when applying those classifications, but generally if something is not on an expansion card but "built-in" on the motherboard, it's usually called "integrated" regardless of actual performance: some may be barely better than a frame buffer, some may be better than a budget "non-integrated card".

The main issue with anything integrated however is the type of memory it uses (there are 100% shared, 100% dedicated as well as hybrid solutions) and the kind of bus it uses to communicate with the rest of the system: such chipsets may appear to be PCI, AGP or PCIe at the logical level, but in reality they may be something entirely different (which can cause driver problems with some OSes).

To answer your guestion, ATI has been making "better than Intel's" integrated GPUs for laptops and some desktop motherboards since forever, while nVidia's M-series of GPUs had little to envy than their desktop counterparts. The only real limits are power consumption, heat, and the prospective buyers' stinginess. A lot of people bought cheapo laptops with integrated Intel crap only to have all sorts of problems later when they tried to play games.

[Patrol1985]

Bucket said:

Doom 3 is a decade old. It runs on a netbook.

I get that the whole selling point of PCs is cutting-edge graphics, but where did this idea that old-ass games aren't even playable come from? This is way beyond general ignorance.

It came from experience. Run "decade old" Doom 3 on my NETBOOK with Intel GPU and then feel free to call me ignorant. After all "it runs on a netbook" right?

Any sort of dynamic lighting makes my GPU choke. Run around in Quake 2 and it's all fine, fire a single blaster shot and all of a sudden you're watching a comic book (unless you switch the lighting off).

That's why I asked about other integrated units. I haven't used any of those apart from Intel's so I wanted some knowledge.

What about those "modern" intel GPUs, which seem to have flooded the market as well? I'm talking about Intel HD 4000 etc. Are they also crappy?

[FireFish]

A netbook is never meant for gaming but :

The most simplistic and barebones list of the minimum needs :
can the gfx chip utilize : opengl 3
does it have at least, acces to : 1 gigabyte of memory
The cpu needs to have more then : 1 gigahertz
minimum nr. of cpu cores : 2

This is kept as minimum as possible, if you do not want your system to be unusable and ancient before you even bought it second hand, or if you want a 'new' machine / motherboard with at least an integrated chip capable of running games...

SIDE NOTE :
some of the modern ati integrated chips should be able to run much more, ranging from games around the 2010 era to maybe 2012 but all on LOW quality. These gaming capable integrated chips are mostly for DESKTOP based motherboards.

- I kept this formulation at a minimum and this forum might have people willing to explain and almost document in more details than i did, with even superior information.

[doomgargoyle]

i have a netbook with a N750 atom CPU 1.66ghz, 2gb ram, dunno about graphics, probably it has GMA. Can that run d3 at medium/high settings?

[FireFish]

an atom N750, it is probably using the GMA 950 chipset, which by all logic should even have problems with quake 3 in high resolutions. Those GMA chips are weak things made to keep power consumption low.

[Maes]

Well, Doom 3 ain't on this list....

For Doom 3 in particular you need something with full OpenGL 1.4 support, and we're talking about the original 2004 release, not the BFG edition (which requires way better specs). Intel's own specs say that the 950 does support DX9 and OpenGL 1.4, but does so with asterisks *.

As for the "power" of the GMA 950, it has just 4 pixel pipelines, no vertex shaders, no texture units, etc. and of course no unified shaders, so you're looking at something which is uncomparable even with a very basic Geforce2. The DX9 and OpenGL 1.4 compliance is purely at the driver/software level, there's simply no fancy hardware to actually back it up.

The biggest deal breaker however is that the amount of video ram used by it is variable/dynamic, and many games will barf upon starting for that reason alone, as there's no reliable way of knowing exactly how much will be available.

All in all, there's no point in trying to run games on it just for the heck of it, unless you like experimenting with vintage GPUs like this guy . I also tried to run 3DMark1999 on an Intel i740 video card. I wasn't impressed, but hey, it worked even on Windows 7 :-)

[doomgargoyle]

Well, I was able to run Quake Live on that netbook at acceptable framerates, I think it was at max settings even. I did disable post-processing because with it on everything ran dog slow.

[Maes]

Well, Quake Live (which uses the Q3 engine) runs even on a tincan, so it's not really a good benchmark :-)

[Mr. T]

Intel's current IGPs are pretty adequate. I could play Borderlands 2 and CS:GO at medium (to keep 60fps) settings on my laptop from last year for example.

[Maes]

Mr. T said:

Intel's current IGPs are pretty adequate. I could play Borderlands 2 and CS:GO at medium (to keep 60fps) settings on my laptop from last year for example.

To be fair, that one is using the Source (or Half Life 2) engine, which despite any enhancements and artwork refinements, is still a 10yo engine. Try running a game using a truly modern engine (like idTech 5 or modern Battlefield/CoD games) and then we're talking ;-)

The modern IGP cards are, spec-wise, somewhat better than the average video card for 2004, where the Source engine comes from. OTOH, the GMA950 was, in 2006, far worse than the average video card in 1999. Two quite different situations :-)

[Pencil of Doom]

doomgargoyle said:

i have a netbook with a N750 atom CPU 1.66ghz, 2gb ram, dunno about graphics, probably it has GMA. Can that run d3 at medium/high settings?

Nope.Your netbook does not meet Doom 3's cpu Ghz reqs.

[FireFish]

Mr. T said:

Stuff i somewhat could see next to the avatar.

That avatar is addicting ! (°_°)
Y is it on doomworld, Who is it, I no Get ! (/3°_°)/3

[Maes]

J.B.R said:

Nope.Your netbook does not meet Doom 3's cpu Ghz reqs.

FWIW, the original Doom 3's "Ghz reqs" were 1.50 GHz for a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon-class CPU, so you could say that they are more or less met even by an Atom-based netbook@1.666 GHz. The original Doom 3 could be played even on sub-GHz machines:

I tried this myself on an old Pentium 3 beater @ 900 MHz, and it worked, provided that you had a supported and decent-ish video card (Geforce 4 or better with 64 MB of video ram, as a minimum), it would work. The BFG edition however, is another story...that one won't even start on an ATI Radeon X1650 that would SMOKE the original Doom 3 O_o

[Pencil of Doom]

Maes said:

FWIW, the original Doom 3's "Ghz reqs" were 1.50 GHz for a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon-class CPU, so you could say that they are more or less met even by an Atom-based netbook@1.666 GHz. The original Doom 3 could be played even on sub-GHz machines:



I tried this myself on an old Pentium 3 beater @ 900 MHz, and it worked, provided that you had a supported and decent-ish video card (Geforce 4 or better with 64 MB of video ram, as a minimum), it would work. The BFG edition however, is another story...that one won't even start on an ATI Radeon X1650 that would SMOKE the original Doom 3 O_o

Strange,i thought that the ghz reqs were 2.0 ghz.
And i didn't know that it was possible to run Doom 3 even on a old pc, because i thought that the id tech 4 engine was for mid and high end pcs.

[doomgargoyle]

Speaking of which, is the atom 1.66 ghz cpu equivalent to a pentium4 cpu? I read that it was more or less the equivalent.

[Patrol1985]

To add to the CPU requirement debate:

Doom 3 requires Pentium IV 1.5 GHz, which is a SINGLE CORE processor

There is a netbook which has a dual-core AMD E1-2100 processor, with each core working at 1 GHz.

How do these compare in terms of performance? A single 1.5 GHz core vs. two 1 GHz cores?

EDIT:

According to the site below, dual-core working at 1 GHz per core absolutely trumps single core at 1.5 GHz:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1053&cmp[]=1968

[Bucket]

doomgargoyle said:

Speaking of which, is the atom 1.66 ghz cpu equivalent to a pentium4 cpu? I read that it was more or less the equivalent.

On the surface, yes. Both chips are hyperthreading and 64-bit. A first-gen Atom benchmarks twice that of a first-gen P4 at the same speed.

[Mr. T]

Maes said:

To be fair, that one is using the Source (or Half Life 2) engine, which despite any enhancements and artwork refinements, is still a 10yo engine. Try running a game using a truly modern engine (like idTech 5 or modern Battlefield/CoD games) and then we're talking ;-)

The modern IGP cards are, spec-wise, somewhat better than the average video card for 2004, where the Source engine comes from. OTOH, the GMA950 was, in 2006, far worse than the average video card in 1999. Two quite different situations :-)

The Source engine in CS:GO is way different to the one from 2004 :-) It was a rude awakening when I couldn't play CS:Source on a computer with much better specs than the one I had in 2004 a few years back.

You can get avg 30fps in BF3 using current Intel IGPs:
http://youtu.be/N2UVco1S6aI

sure it's not amazing, but it's pretty exciting how far IGPs have come along.

[Maes]

To be fair, the current IGPs at least use the -oh so revolutionary- Unified Shaders/Processing Units architecture pioneered in 2005, so the very least you'll get better support from drivers and software alike. In that sense, it's probably a bit better than an nVidia 6200 (which had somehow become the informal minimum for later DX9 games, and which was sold even overclocked and over-RAMmed to ridiculous degrees, as if it was some high-end card...).

As for the term "integrated": if you notice, manufacturers such as ATI/AMD and nVidia offer both "integrated" and "mobile" (nVidia) or "mobility" (ATI/AMD) versions of their GPUs. The difference is subtle, but it's there: "integrated" is used for low-end products with few features and shared RAM, and generally implies that several compromises have been made to "integrate" it. The better-ish products with more powerful GPUs and dedicated RAM get the name "Mobile" or "Mobility".

As to how low-end integrated GPUs fare in modern games....recently we benchmarked the ATI HD4200 used in this ASUS mobo, using both 3DMark 2003 and the 2011. The oldish 3DMark 2003 was used to see how it would fare against a medium-high end GPU from 2004-2005. My ATI Sapphire Radeon 9600XT got scores in the 4500-5000 area, the HD 4200 got about 16000 (but don't forget, it had a massive CPU and memory speed advantage, too) so it's definitively more than capable of running 10 yo or even 6-7 yo games, with some power to spare. By comparison, the nVidia 8600M in my Dell Insiron 1720 laptop gets 8000-8500 in the same test.

However, when used with 3DMark 2011, everything was reduced to a slideshow. I was surprised that most tests did run rather than abort due to unsupported features, so the drivers somehow made everything appear OK and "supported", even if actually using them was a pain.

[doomgargoyle]

It's stupid that regular doom3 could run on a pentium 4 but the bfg edition requires such high specs just to barely run. They artificially upped the requirements.

[Patrol1985]

Yeah, I never understood it either. I've read somewhere that Doom 3 BFG uses fragments of id Tech 5 code, but if devs implemented those solutions they could have at least made them more VISIBLE. For me, the BFG edition doesn't look better. It just looks different. However, I appreciate that it's brighter than vanilla Doom 3.

[doomgargoyle]

Really? I didnt see the id tech 5 effects either. Doom 3 with sikkmod looks better than BFG. And I didnt get why they removed xp support in BFG.

[Patrol1985]

Sadly, BFG was just a cash grab. RAGE failed to deliver in profits (undeservedly, in my opinion) so id (Zenimax to be precise) needed a product which would make up for it. Doom was an established brand name and Doom 3 is to this day the best selling game by id Software so it was an obvious choice. The joke's on me though, because I bought it, but I wanted legal access to all official Doom stuff, which includes "The Lost Mission" for Doom 3 and "No Rest for the Living" for Doom II. I would have MUCH preferred it if they simply released those as some sort of DLC for the original Doom 3 / Doom II respectively. As for the upgraded flashlight, map lighting and additional ammo boxes, these could have been easily applied in the form of a patch...

... but then they wouldn't have earned as much as they did, so I don't blame them really. They just shouldn't have dropped mod support, XP support and increased system requirements. Those were completely unnecessary moves, against id's agenda (they always supported modding for their games). Also, if I remember correctly the original Doom 3 got pulled from Steam for some time so people would buy BFG instead. THAT was a dick move.

[FireFish]

I to bought the BFG edition and i cant complain, now i have yet again doom 3, some extras, much smoother gameplay, And the slightly altered DOOM and DOOM2 wads which come with it.

The ID software github holds the DOOM 3 bfg edition source code so people can still make mods. The problem is almost none of the mods for the original doom 3 would work in the reprogrammed BFG edition.

[Maes]

doomgargoyle said:

And I didnt get why they removed xp support in BFG.

To be precise, XP is not officially supported but it's not officialy prohibited either. They didn't remove XP support explicitly and directly, and the game might still work on certain configurations, just like it won't work on certain others. It's not as if you try starting the game in XP, it will give you the middle finger or give you an "unsupported version of Windows" error right away.

Rather, what has been significantly upped are the GFX drivers requirements. Doom 3 was OpenGL 1.4, the BFG edition bumps this up to OpenGL 2.1, and some graphics cards and their drivers simply did not keep up. That most of these cards and drivers were used on XP systems was simply a coincidence (or rather, a side-effect of them now being considered "legacy" in most cases).

On my old XP system, the reason for it not starting was that my ATI X1650 card didn't have an XP driver providing 2.x OpenGL support, even though the card and the OS were perfectly technically capable of it.

[doomgargoyle]

Maes said:

To be precise, XP is not officially supported but it's not officialy prohibited either. They didn't remove XP support explicitly and directly, and the game might still work on certain configurations, just like it won't work on certain others. It's not as if you try starting the game in XP, it will give you the middle finger or give you an "unsupported version of Windows" error right away.

Rather, what has been significantly upped are the GFX drivers requirements. Doom 3 was OpenGL 1.4, the BFG edition bumps this up to OpenGL 2.1, and some graphics cards and their drivers simply did not keep up. That most of these cards and drivers were used on XP systems was simply a coincidence (or rather, a side-effect of them now being considered "legacy" in most cases).

On my old XP system, the reason for it not starting was that my ATI X1650 card didn't have an XP driver providing 2.x OpenGL support, even though the card and the OS were perfectly technically capable of it.

That sucks, having the hardware capable of supporting 2.1 but the drivers dont. Ok, I think ill try it on my computer which still runs xp, I think its card's drivers support opengl 2.x at least. Appreciate it. :)

[doomgargoyle]

Maes said:

To be precise, XP is not officially supported but it's not officialy prohibited either. They didn't remove XP support explicitly and directly, and the game might still work on certain configurations, just like it won't work on certain others. It's not as if you try starting the game in XP, it will give you the middle finger or give you an "unsupported version of Windows" error right away.

Rather, what has been significantly upped are the GFX drivers requirements. Doom 3 was OpenGL 1.4, the BFG edition bumps this up to OpenGL 2.1, and some graphics cards and their drivers simply did not keep up. That most of these cards and drivers were used on XP systems was simply a coincidence (or rather, a side-effect of them now being considered "legacy" in most cases).

On my old XP system, the reason for it not starting was that my ATI X1650 card didn't have an XP driver providing 2.x OpenGL support, even though the card and the OS were perfectly technically capable of it.

That sucks, having the hardware capable of supporting 2.1 but the drivers dont. Ok, I think ill try it on my computer which still runs xp, I think its card's drivers support opengl 2.x at least. Appreciate it. :)

Patrol1985 said:

Sadly, BFG was just a cash grab. RAGE failed to deliver in profits (undeservedly, in my opinion) so id (Zenimax to be precise) needed a product which would make up for it. Doom was an established brand name and Doom 3 is to this day the best selling game by id Software so it was an obvious choice. The joke's on me though, because I bought it, but I wanted legal access to all official Doom stuff, which includes "The Lost Mission" for Doom 3 and "No Rest for the Living" for Doom II. I would have MUCH preferred it if they simply released those as some sort of DLC for the original Doom 3 / Doom II respectively. As for the upgraded flashlight, map lighting and additional ammo boxes, these could have been easily applied in the form of a patch...

... but then they wouldn't have earned as much as they did, so I don't blame them really. They just shouldn't have dropped mod support, XP support and increased system requirements. Those were completely unnecessary moves, against id's agenda (they always supported modding for their games). Also, if I remember correctly the original Doom 3 got pulled from Steam for some time so people would buy BFG instead. THAT was a dick move.

Dont forget Zenimax LOVES Steam and its DRM, and all of their titles get the Steamworks treatment. They wouldnt have just added DLC to the old doom 3 release, without making it steamworks too, and in that case why not just make a completely new release, like the BFG?