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It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU

It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU will, but any commercial game understands that only a tiny segment of the market is going to be aware of that, and it degrades onto the lower-specced hardware, as the other poster is saying. I'm sure Witcher 3 is among them. If your game literally can't run on something that isn't DX12 or OGL 4.5 (i.e., latest-gen hardware) and at least a mid-range discrete GPU, you should absolutely make sure the consumer has every opportunity to be well aware of that prior to purchase. It's also not a big deal as long as you refund the purchase. There's no reason not to refund it within the first 30 days / first few hours of play time if the consumer's PC can't run it. I'm not one of these people who believes that consumers are automatically entitled to refunds, and in fact I ran a service that offered no refunds due to the nature of the product, but refusing in the case of an incompatible PC, when you can see the consumer has hardly used the product and it's not past the return window, is just being asinine. There's also no reason that Steam shouldn't be able to check your computer's specs before you install a game and see if they meet minimum requirements, and then give you a warning before you proceed if they don't. It'd be awesome if that warning automatically included a "Refund Me and Remove the Game from My Library" feature. It'd be even more awesome if Steam kept track of everything this happened on and offered you the same games at 20% off once it detected an upgrade. :) Regardless, avoiding this confusion/complexity/consumer irritation is a large reason that consoles are more popular than PCs for everyone, from the developer to the retailer to the end user. Your standard consumer knows if they have a Xbox (or at least they did before there was the Xbox 1 and the Xbox One...), but they don't know if their GPU supports a certain API level or the difference between their low-end mobile nvidia GPU and a Titan X.

izacus 10y ago
> It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU will, but any commercial game understands that only a tiny segment of the market is going to be aware of that, and it degrades onto the lower-specced hardware, as the other poster is saying. I'm sure Witcher 3 is among them. If your game literally can't run on something that isn't DX12 or OGL 4.5 (i.e., latest-gen hardware) and at least a mid-range discrete GPU, you should absolutely make sure the consumer has every opportunity to be well aware of that prior to purchase. That's just not true for any kind of this years AAA titles. They may barely run on an Iris Pro, but everything else is not going to provide even remotely usable framerate (if it'll start at all). I think you're hugely underestimating the huge 3D performance difference between the laptop Intels and a gaming GPU card like the currently most popular GTX 970. Intel GPUs are connected to a significantly slower shared RAM over significantly less bandwidth, they're noticably more thermally restricted (since they're sharing cooling with the main core) and have significantly less processing cores. Having said that, I do fully agree that having a clear UI to tell you if your game is playable on your current machine is in order. As far as I know, you can already refund the game without problems, there's just not clear warning. And I DO want a warning, not an error check - we've seen countless cases of misdetection when games refused to run on hardware they didn't recognise correctly. Not to mention the usecases like mine, where I regularly buy games on Steam on my Mac just to play them on Windows.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I haven't personally tried this with recent games, but as a rule, AAA titles do degrade to older hardware on their own, and when they don't, there are communities that publish modified resource packs and super-low-end configs to squeeze maximal FPS out of a low-end graphics solution. I used one such solution to run Team Fortress 2 via WINE many years ago on a very crappy AMD machine with integrated graphics. Yes, the game looked like an N64 game, but it was playable at a good frame rate. Lowering your resolution (play windowed) and going to minimal built-in configs is usually good enough for hardware up to 4-5 years old, which is reasonably competitive with the console lifecycle. Older than this and you usually need to get into hacking the resources/config to make it playable. There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.
  - izacus 10y ago
    > There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs. Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :) Let's see the most successful games of the year: - Battlefield 1, needs at least GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM. Will not start on Intel. - Call of Duty: Inifinite Warfare. Same requirement. - Overwatch, actually runs on Intel HD 4400. Needs at least 660/7950 to run well etc. :)
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      > Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :) You're using Steam statistics as if they applied, proportionally, to the PC gaming industry when its users are majority PC gaming enthusiasts. This also means Steam makes up a small amount of most gaming company's sales. The majority is still done through big box stores. The statistics are interesting but I'm not sure how useful they are for determining target requirements from most gaming companies.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago

izacus 10y ago

> It's not true that integrated GPUs are just not powerful enough to run modern 3D games. They're not going to push the same qty of triangles that a discrete GPU will, but any commercial game understands that only a tiny segment of the market is going to be aware of that, and it degrades onto the lower-specced hardware, as the other poster is saying. I'm sure Witcher 3 is among them. If your game literally can't run on something that isn't DX12 or OGL 4.5 (i.e., latest-gen hardware) and at least a mid-range discrete GPU, you should absolutely make sure the consumer has every opportunity to be well aware of that prior to purchase. That's just not true for any kind of this years AAA titles. They may barely run on an Iris Pro, but everything else is not going to provide even remotely usable framerate (if it'll start at all). I think you're hugely underestimating the huge 3D performance difference between the laptop Intels and a gaming GPU card like the currently most popular GTX 970. Intel GPUs are connected to a significantly slower shared RAM over significantly less bandwidth, they're noticably more thermally restricted (since they're sharing cooling with the main core) and have significantly less processing cores. Having said that, I do fully agree that having a clear UI to tell you if your game is playable on your current machine is in order. As far as I know, you can already refund the game without problems, there's just not clear warning. And I DO want a warning, not an error check - we've seen countless cases of misdetection when games refused to run on hardware they didn't recognise correctly. Not to mention the usecases like mine, where I regularly buy games on Steam on my Mac just to play them on Windows.

cookiecaper 10y ago
I haven't personally tried this with recent games, but as a rule, AAA titles do degrade to older hardware on their own, and when they don't, there are communities that publish modified resource packs and super-low-end configs to squeeze maximal FPS out of a low-end graphics solution. I used one such solution to run Team Fortress 2 via WINE many years ago on a very crappy AMD machine with integrated graphics. Yes, the game looked like an N64 game, but it was playable at a good frame rate. Lowering your resolution (play windowed) and going to minimal built-in configs is usually good enough for hardware up to 4-5 years old, which is reasonably competitive with the console lifecycle. Older than this and you usually need to get into hacking the resources/config to make it playable. There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.
- izacus 10y ago
  > There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs. Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :) Let's see the most successful games of the year: - Battlefield 1, needs at least GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM. Will not start on Intel. - Call of Duty: Inifinite Warfare. Same requirement. - Overwatch, actually runs on Intel HD 4400. Needs at least 660/7950 to run well etc. :)
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :) You're using Steam statistics as if they applied, proportionally, to the PC gaming industry when its users are majority PC gaming enthusiasts. This also means Steam makes up a small amount of most gaming company's sales. The majority is still done through big box stores. The statistics are interesting but I'm not sure how useful they are for determining target requirements from most gaming companies.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago