How good should the built in Intel Iris Xe graphics card be for gaming?
Anything I play that uses GPU at all is laggy and dropping frames. I’m taking 10 year old games like “Halo Wars: Definitive Edition” or mostly 2d games like the first Hollow Knight. Turn based boardgames from steam work ok-ish, but anything real time is a non starter.
I admit I did not buy this for gaming and I don’t expect it to run the latest hot FPS. But I have recently been traveling more and I would be nice if I could play some low intensity games in hotel rooms.
Is this expected or is this worse then normal?
Is there anything I can do (without money) to mitigate this to make old games playable?
Is there a reasonably low cost upgrade that might help? (Under ~$100)
The Iris Xe graphics are pretty weak so it can struggle in certain games. Are you running dual channel memory? If you want to eek out the most performance, ensure that you’re plugged in, have maximum performance set in your OS, and update your graphics drivers to the latest ones.
Hmm, I used to have 11th gen, I thought it felt pretty good for an iGPU (at reasonable graphics settings for an iGPU).
You could check whether your system is performing well relative to others with the same chip by comparing benchmarks
Here’s some published results:
(note that the i5-1135G7 has 80 execution units instead of 96, if that’s what you have).
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No, hollow knight should be performing well from what I recall. I can play Stardew, ONI, FTL, those kinds of games at acceptable FPS on a 10th gen i5 (Ice Lake). Hollow Knight can’t be that much more intense…
I second @TheTRUEAsian , are you using dual channel memory? And if so, is it running at 3200MT/s speed?
EDIT: I checked Steam and Hollow Knight is Steam Deck verified so clearly it is possible to get acceptable performance. Minimum spec is a positively ancient GTX card with 1GB VRAM. Something is definitely up with your config if you are running into problems.
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ONI, Really? Oxygen Not Included? Because that’s the game I really wanted to play and it’s just barely playable at slow speed with a lot of pausing to build anything. But that’s more of a CPU Issue. I had sort of written it off.
This was useful I scored a bit below expected for FurMark and a bot above for PassMark. But those definitely had the same stutter I’m seeing in the games.
CPU-Z says Im dual channal. I’m not sure how to check the other I have a 1T Command Rate if that means anything.
I just have the memory that came with it.
That’s the one! I’m playing on an i5-1035g4
So it’s both weaker in CPU and GPU. It’s perfectly playable. The laptop gets toasty but performance is fine. I haven’t any idea what’s up with your laptop. Have you tried re-pasting the CPU? Cleaning the fans? Beyond that, are you on Windows? Made sure there wasn’t system updates happening in the background and that kind of thing? All drivers and games up to date etc?
I’ll grant that I’m not very good at ONI so perhaps it’s just early game that runs smooth enough…
Just checked steam and the recommended gpu for ONI is Intel HD 4600. That launched in 2013. Suffice to say, GPU is not your problem. Recommended CPU is any dual core clocked above 2Ghz, so CPU shouldn’t be a problem either.
If using windows, task manager will say under the memory tab both dual channel and the speed it is running at. Alternatively, crack open the laptop and glance at the sticker on the memory. But if you purchased the memory with the laptop, you purchased 3200MT/s memory as that is what Framework sold IIRC.