Back in December 2013, I decided to trade in my hunk of junk six year old HP Pavilion PC for a new custom built PC. Running on an Intel i5-4570, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD with Windows 7, I was in PC gaming heaven at the time. I couldn’t quite afford a new video card, so my 3 year old Radeon HD5770 was put into the PC as a stopgap until I could afford a new video card. It worked out great, pushing most of the PC games I had to high settings.
But then, tragedy struck. I saw graphical artifacts while playing Crysis, but thought nothing of it at the time. Several days later, my video card started spinning its fans loudly while I was idling on my PC, temperatures rising by the second. Even with a quick dusting, the card still got loud and didn’t show a picture. It happened to me again: a video card died on me. I got the HD5770 as an emergency replacement for my dead GeForce 8800GT back in 2010, and now I had another dead video card. I was amazed the Radeon lasted that long, maybe pushing all those polygons in those two months was a bit hard on the old gal.
For the past month I’ve been playing other games, mostly on console. Stuff like binging the 2010 Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit reboot and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Annoyed that I couldn’t play much on the PC, I decided to test something.
All CPUs these days come with a integrated graphics chip inside them. The most hardcore of PC gamers won’t go this route, opting to buy a video card to do all the heavy lifting for their gaming needs. I thought I’d give my i5 processor’s integrated graphics chip a shot in the meantime. After installing the newest drivers for it, I tried a bunch of games on the HD4600, Intel’s integrated graphics chip and screenshotted the results.
Boy, I was surprised at what worked and how it ran. Pretty much every game I threw at it worked mostly fine with little problems, albeit with considerably lower graphical fidelity. For several of the games, I had to kick the resolution down to 1280×720 and lowering the graphics settings as far as they could, but most of them ran perfectly fine. Here are a few examples I decided to try:
Grand Theft Auto IV
I never thought this could run GTA IV. The game was notorious at the time for its ridiculous hardware requirements, though we’ve made significant advances in technology since its PC release five years ago. It ran pretty well even with the HD5770, so I was totally not expecting this to work with the Intel graphics. Yet, I could run this, with everything on low, at about 15-20 frames per second. There’s a lot of model and texture pop-in, so it’s not the most ideal way to experience Liberty City, but it’s playable.
Surprisingly from what little I played, I enjoyed it. Then again, I was never into the goofy antics that plagued the earlier GTA games like San Andreas, so maybe this game is perfect for me.
Saints Row IV
I remember slogging through Saints Row: The Third on that junky old PC. Everything on low quality at 640×480, with framerates well into the teens. Some very dark times.
When I upgraded to the new PC, being able to run that as well as Saints Row IV here on high settings with a solid framerate was a godsend. Even with the integrated graphics shown here, I can still run and jump through cyber Steelport with little problems. Drastically better than what I suffered on the old PC.
I need to get back to this game sometime, this game is pure dumb fun.