DV1000 and Integrated graphics question

[keepitdark]

I'm seriously considering the HP DV1000 but had a graphics-related question: how will it handle games that are easier on the graphics system, like Civ III, the Sims, or Zoo Tycoon? Or even with these am I better off going with a discrete GPU (with coupons the Dell 8600 series is within range)

My searching has led me to two general answers to integrated graphics questions: "integrated graphics suck" and "they are fine for web surfing and business computing," but no one hits on this mid level game performance.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[vkeks05]

That's a pretty good question. I'm curious myself...

 

[pookguy88]

my question, will it play World of Warcraft?

 

[halfadder]

The most advanced game I've played on integrated graphics has been Quake 3. It worked ok, but I had to turn the resolution and quality waaaaay down to make it work. For basic games, integrated graphics will work as long as your CPU is fast enough and you have dual channel ram. Without a real GPU, the integrated graphics need to use your CPU for all of the work and need to use your system's ram for the frame buffer and textures. Even if you're just using 2D applications like MS Word, it will slow down the machine significantly. And it's much slower for 3D than even a low end GPU. Combine these down and you have a very slow game system.

For an example of the hit on your ram bandwidth, consider a 1024 x 768 desktop... that's 786,432 pixels, at high color (32 bit = 4 bytes per pixel) that's exactly 3 MB of data per frame or "screenshot"(786432 * 4 bytes = 3,145,728 bytes... / 1024 / 1024 = 3 MB). Modern graphics are double buffered, the system is writing data into the "next frame" while the current frame is being sent to the display. So that's 6 MB per frame at any given moment. 60 Hz is a common refresh rate for an LCD, so 6 * 60 = 360 MB/sec of your ram bandwidth is being used up just to draw images to your monitor. At 1280x1024 resolution, it's 600 MB/sec. With a real GPU, this bandwidth is provided by dedicated graphics memory, freeing up both your CPU and your system memory bandwidth. When you play a game, your system CPU and memory are very busy with the logic of the game, plus any of the other graphics not counted in the previous calculation (tiles, textures, geometry data, etc). A real GPU is optimized for loading, resizing, and placing textures in a scene. For each 3 MB frame produced, 25 MB or more textures may be loaded and manipulated. This adds up very quickly! A real GPU is optimized for crunching the numbers to generate 3D geometry. With integrated graphics, your CPU does most of the work.

World of Warcraft is bad enough on Radeon 9200 or GeForce FX 5200... I wouldn't even want to try it on integrated graphics.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Very good dissection halfadder!
If you want to see how the dv1000's Intel Extreme Graphics 2 performs, look for my review on the dv1000 at the website in my sig; should be up in 2 days or so
As an advance taste of the graphics capabilities, here is what it scored:
3DMark01: 1965
3DMark03: 90 :Q :Q :Q
So while it might work for really old games like The Sims (With at least 768MB RAM IMO), but discrete is a much better option.

 

[Tom]

I was surprised how well Rise of Nations runs on my Compaq 2232us, even with only 256mb ram ! I haven't gotten into a place with lots of sprites on the screen so maybe that will bring it to it's knees.

Celeron M 360, IEG2. $400 !