Intel UHD 620 sufficient?

[chowbar]

Hey guys, I've been shopping around for a new laptop and since I'm a broke college kid I'm also on a budget. While this laptop will mostly be for school and browsing, I also want to play GZDoom and other source ports on it as well. While I know a dedicated GPU is always better, they tend to be on heavier and more expensive laptops which is not something I'd prefer. Lots of thin and lights seem to come with an integrated Intel UHD 620 GPU, so I wanted to ask you guys, is an Intel UHD 620 with 8GB of RAM sufficient for running GZDoom with all the fancy bells and whistles?

Should I just save up for a laptop with a dedicated GPU? Or is a RAM upgrade with the 620 sufficient?

[TDRR]

Hey guys, I've been shopping around for a new laptop and since I'm a broke college kid I'm also on a budget. While this laptop will mostly be for school and browsing, I also want to play GZDoom and other source ports on it as well. While I know a dedicated GPU is always better, they tend to be on heavier and more expensive laptops which is not something I'd prefer. Lots of thin and lights seem to come with an integrated Intel UHD 620 GPU, so I wanted to ask you guys, is an Intel UHD 620 with 8GB of RAM sufficient for running GZDoom with all the fancy bells and whistles?

Should I just save up for a laptop with a dedicated GPU? Or is a RAM upgrade with the 620 sufficient?

If my trash Intel HD 4000 can run GZDoom 3.x with SOME effects at a resolution around 900 i can't remember at around 70fps then your GPU should be okay. This does NOT account for mods and some of them (Doom Tournament comes to mind) will run like real hot steaming garbage.

And if you are dying for performance you can roll back to GZDoom 1.9 (or 1.8.6 if that isn't enough) or use Zandronum.

If those effects GZDoom 3.x has won't run nice in your system you can use GZDoom 1.9 with the attached files unzipped into it's directory. You may want to enable SSAO but personally the bloom gives enough life to the graphics for me.

Also why the heck would you want to crank the graphics up so much? Literally the only stuff that looks good with Doom are a couple shaders, dynamic lights, trilinear filtering with 4x aniso, bloom and AO, most other stuff destroys performance and doesn't look quite as nice. Some of the tonemapping can look good too but it's much more personal preference than the other options.

EDIT: Nevermind, performance is way slower render-wise in the latest builds. If you want effects GZDoom 1.9 may be your only option. From what i heard ReShade which works with new versions is a performance drainer.

[chowbar]

Actually TDRR, it's funny you mention an Intel HD 4000, cause that's exactly what I have on my current laptop. And while it ain't perfect, I'll agree that it seems to support 3.7.1 fine as long as there's not too many dynamic lights.

I prob phrased it wrong, but by bells and whistles, I was wondering if a UHD 620 would be sufficient supporting GZDoom with more intensive gameplay mods and on larger maps. But by your word, that seems pretty unlikely.

I agree with you that Doom doesn't need a lot to look good in GZDoom. Really all I use are lights and brightmaps and I don't see myself using all of GZDoom's effects ever.

[TDRR]

Actually TDRR, it's funny you mention an Intel HD 4000, cause that's exactly what I have on my current laptop. And while it ain't perfect, I'll agree that it seems to support 3.7.1 fine as long as there's not too many dynamic lights.

I prob phrased it wrong, but by bells and whistles, I was wondering if a UHD 620 would be sufficient supporting GZDoom with more intensive gameplay mods and on larger maps. But by your word, that seems pretty unlikely.

I agree with you that Doom doesn't need a lot to look good in GZDoom. Really all I use are lights and brightmaps and I don't see myself using all of GZDoom's effects ever.

Then you can probably run some of the complex maps well, if you enable additive lights (gl_lights_additive 1) you get a performance boost, r_scalefactor (or vid_scalefactor?) to 0.5 also makes the game slightly blurrier but it's worth the framerate boost.

Of course i still recommend GZDoom 1.8.6 because it's leaps and bounds faster than later GZDoom versions at the cost of way less modding features. Most maps are fine though.

If you want gameplay mods that work with GZDoom 1.8.6 there's: D4T, Brutal Doom and Project Brutality (2.03 only), Complex Doom, Counter Strike Doom: Martian Offensive (great mod), omgwpns, Xaser's Parkour and literally every single mod made by me (If you want i can too make a list of those)

[Graf Zahl]

is an Intel UHD 620 with 8GB of RAM sufficient for running GZDoom

Yes, unless...

with all the fancy bells and whistles?

Not really. Like everything Intel it is first and foremost designed for GUI related tasks. Unless you overtax the game with graphical effects it should be fine. Just don't expect some huge level to produce good frame rates.

Should I just save up for a laptop with a dedicated GPU? Or is a RAM upgrade with the 620 sufficient?

I cannot give you advice on this, but my personal experience with laptops is that if there is no dedicated graphics card built in, the rest of the hardware often also isn't really that good for gaming.

Regarding the statements about the HD4000, I have to disagree. I got one in my CPU myself and this really shows some strain if I load up a larger map that would run with 150+ fps on my primary Geforce card. It should be ok if you disable most effects and lower the render resolution to half the screen's size and then upscale in postprocessing.

[Rachael]

I have a Intel HD 4600, which I am fairly sure is a lot weaker than a UHD 620.

As TDRR said, "vid_scalefactor 0.5" is hugely helpful.

The thing that murders the frame rate on these things is anything that requires a large number of GPU cores. As Graf said, they were never designed for anything outside of simple office-related crap - they're meant to run Microsoft Word and Firefox and Outlook, not GZDoom or really any other game. Obviously, lowering the resolution suddenly reduces the number of cores required to draw all the geometry smoothly, so that's why it's so effective.

As for a UHD 620 - it might well run GZDoom with all the bells and whistles turned on, but I don't expect it to run smoothly. Who knows, though. That's something you just have to try, yourself.

[phantombeta]

One thing to mention is that you shouldn't even try turning SSAO on - Intel GPUs do not handle SSAO well at all, and framerate will tank instantly even on the simplest of maps. (The option for it is labelled "Ambient Occlusion" in the menu)
Aside from that, if you don't enable multisampling, you might be able to get a smooth 60FPS at about 1280x720 on maps with low to medium complexity.

[Rachael]

It's a much more modern Intel GPU than what most of us have played with. I don't think SSAO is going to be as bad on it as it would be for us.

At 1280x720, my HD 4600 is able to handle 32x multisampling quite smoothly. This is a 4th generation chip. The UHD 620 is 8th gen. What mine struggles with, this one would obviously consider to be a joke.

[TDRR]

I got one in my CPU myself and this really shows some strain if I load up a larger map that would run with 150+ fps on my primary Geforce card

Then you can probably run some of the complex maps well, if you enable additive lights (gl_lights_additive 1) you get a performance boost, r_scalefactor (or vid_scalefactor?) to 0.5 also makes the game slightly blurrier but it's worth the framerate boost.

Well, of course, i mean like running at barely 50fps or so, playable but not the best. And i don't mean like super-latest gen maps but more like those in Skulltag.

But yeah you would play best with additive lights (the performance increase is actually noticeable with old Intels but not sure about that UHD 620) vid_scalefactor 0.5, filtering and x4 aniso, and probably bloom but that's about as far you can get in non-vanilla maps.

[phantombeta]

It's a much more modern Intel GPU than what most of us have played with. I don't think SSAO is going to be as bad on it as it would be for us.

At 1280x720, my HD 4600 is able to handle 32x multisampling quite smoothly. This is a 4th generation chip. The UHD 620 is 8th gen. What mine struggles with, this one would obviously consider to be a joke.

Uh...
It's definitely not a much more modern Intel GPU than I have. My processor's GPU is an HD 630, which is about only a single generation behind the UHD 620, and SSAO kills the framerate pretty quickly.

[Graf Zahl]

According to videocardbenchmark.net the UHD 620 is roughly twice as fast as the HD 4000 and half as fast as a Geforce 550Ti, which in turn is a quarter of the Geforce 1060's performance. The 630 is a bit faster, but not much.
These GPUs are very barely capable of running games. My old Geforce 550 was barely capable of handling shadowmaps and SSAO, so these weaker chipsets won't do well with such features.

[drfrag]

Of course i still recommend GZDoom 1.8.6 because it's leaps and bounds faster than later GZDoom versions at the cost of way less modding features.

That intel card should be enough to run the modern build. Why do you keep recommending those ancient versions? On modern and decent hardware i don't think there's much of a difference and it's like comparing apples vs oranges.
BTW what's wrong with ZDoom LE? It's two years ahead 1.8.6 and besides those old versions are unsafe and contain far more bugs. I don't know if it's slower or not but it's a MinGW build for compatibility with win 98. No one complained else i'd released a VS 2015 build. But that one is for GL 1.x hardware.
Then there's ZDoom32 which is the last iteration of the old renderer and should be pretty fast since is a VS 2015 build.
BTW those new low detail modes were a mess and i've finally fixed them. Seems that adding the 3x1 mode it's not possible BTW.

[Graf Zahl]

Of course i still recommend GZDoom 1.8.6 because it's leaps and bounds faster than later GZDoom versions at the cost of way less modding features.

That intel card should be enough to run the modern build.

It does, but it's obviously slower. Still, that recommendation is a very bogus conclusion that anything that's fast on low end hardware will automatically be faster on modern hardware as well. On any real GPU the modern build will be faster, 'modern' in this case meaning anything from Geforce 4xx series and up.

What this episode shows again is that trying to make software work well on up-to-date hardware and on obsolete systems is a losing proposition. You will always run into walls put up by the old hardware which ultimately prevents exploiting the modern one.

[chowbar]

Wow thanks for all the helpful replies!
I prob should’ve rephrased it but I really don’t use all of GZDooms fancy bells and whistles. No bloom, no SSAO, etc.
If all I ever use are lights and brigthmaps, I should be ok for larger maps right?

That said I’ll use additive lighting and drop vid_scalefactor if anything gets too unplayable.

After going through my options it seems like I will be settling for a UHD 620. While not ideal I gotta get through school first. Thanks for the help!

[Rachael]

Yeah the UHD 620 is perfectly fine for running GZDoom. Have fun!