GT Legends (Windows, 2005)

1920x1080, full quality, 4xSupersampling

Min spec: 64 MB DirectX 8.1 card, Pentium III, 512 MB RAM
Rec spec: 256 MB DirectX 9.0c card, Pentium 4 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Where to get it: Steam (£4.99) NB: DRM-free

Saints Row 2 proved to be at the limit of my PC's abilities, but this time I have a couple of advantages. First, GT Legends is three years older, and so has significantly lower minimum and recommended hardware levels. Second, it's a game I've owned for years and that I'm actually reasonably good at!

For testing purposes, I entered 20-car races (ie me and 19 AI opponents) at the Donington National and Mondello Short tracks included with the game. I decided to use the in-car cockpit view, since GT Legends is enough of a sim (by 2005 standards) that most players are likely to use this camera setting.

The news is encouraging. At 1920x1080 on Full quality settings, with 4x Supersampling enabled, I generally got low-mid 30s fps in the thick of racing action, although this did dip to the mid-20s at the start. Take Supersampling off and things start to look a bit on the jaggy side, but the switch adds 5-10 fps to the score.

GT Legends doesn't lose much of its visual appeal if you drop the resolution to 1366x768, but keep Supersampling on, and at that point you can generally count on mid-40s fps most of the time. Avoid switching up shadows to full or enabling swaying trees as these can be substantial fps hits; you hardly notice them at 100+ mph anyway!

The cockpit view is middling in terms of fps. Bonnet and nose cameras might add 10% to your frame rate, but the chase view delivers a fairly hard hit – as much as 25% in some cases. If you're merely hotlapping rather than racing, you can pretty much do what you like. Note that some third-party tracks are a bit heavier graphically than the inbuilt circuits.

There's no doubt in my mind that GT Legends is highly playable with the Intel HD 2500 GPU integrated into my i3-3220. With a little tweaking, perhaps dropping down to 1280x720 or disabling a couple of effects, i3s with the slightly slower HD 2000 shouldn't have too much of a problem either.

Next time: SuperTuxKart (Linux)

Saints Row 2 (Windows, 2008)

1280x720, medium quality

Min spec: Nvidia 7600 / ATI X1300, Pentium Dual-Core 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Rec spec: Nvidia 8800 / ATI HD3850, Pentium Dual-Core 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM
Where to get it: GOG (£7.79)

We're starting off with a pretty tough ask: a game that may be almost a decade old now and use DirectX 9, but which doesn't have a good reputation for working well with integrated graphics chips. It's fair to say that this reputation is deserved, as I found it a real struggle to get a playable frame rate – and even then it depends how you define "playable".

Using the initial "Jailbreak" level, I found that the best (well, least worst) option was to go for 1280x720 on Medium quality settings, which generally produced low 20s fps. Some gamers will find this unbearable, but I found it surprisingly playable. Admittedly, I'm absolutely terrible at this game so probably wouldn't notice much anyway!

Shifting down to Low quality made the whole thing look terrible for a minimal fps increase, and the same was true of going down to the minimum supported resolution of 640x480. Nice as the shadows and lighting on High quality look, they're not for us as frame rates barely get into double figures at times.

With all this in mind, I'm going to declare Saints Row 2 to be marginally playable with the OptiPlex and its Intel HD 2500 chip. This may seem a rather disappointing way to kick off this blog, but I want to be realistic here – and besides, this is one tough game for low-powered, integrated GPUs to handle.

Next time: GT Legends (2005, Windows)

Welcome to Integrated Gamer!

So, what is this blog for? Well...

Do you own a PC that relies on an integrated graphics processor? Perhaps it's an ex-corporate model that you bought second-hand because it was cheap. Are you not a dedicated gamer, but still someone who likes to have fun from time to time? Me too.

Have you grown tired of posters on so-called help forums doing little more than laughing when you ask what your computer is like for gaming, or being told that nothing short of a discrete graphics card costing twice the price of your entire PC is worth using? Yes? Well, you too might be an Integrated Gamer!

I'm here to tell you that you absolutely can enjoy playing games on such a PC. Lots and lots of games. Sure, you're not going to be playing the latest AAA titles in 1920x1080 at ultra quality settings. Bluntly, you're mostly going to be playing older games. But there's still a lot of space to explore and enjoy.

Before I go any further, here's the PC I'm using:

Dell OptiPlex 7010 (Small Form Factor case)
Intel Core i3-3220 (3.3 GHz)
Intel HD 2500 graphics (integrated into CPU)
6 GB RAM
500 GB hard disk
DVDRW

This is not an expensive setup by any means: the base unit cost me just under £75 on eBay recently. I did have to add my own monitor, keyboard, mouse and operating systems: I dual-boot with Windows 7 Home Premium and Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon. The Dell is very much an ex-corporate model and so not very upgradeable. With one or two exceptions, I'm stuck with what I've got – and this is the system on which I'll be trying games out.

That's all for now. Next time, I'll be seeing how an actual game performs on this hardware. Join me then!