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Comment by szatkus | Hacker News Reader

That iGPU (HD 4400, 20 EU) is more than enough for most of these games. I guess Intel's Linux driver is more buggy than AMD.

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My experience has generally been that intel's linux drivers are pretty damn solid and AMDs verge on broken by default. I haven't really gotten a chance to try the new AMD OSS drivers in anger, but I don't have high expectations.

That said, for a long time everyone gushed about nvidia's linux drivers and I found them pretty damn frustrating.

I get much better performance from AMD's open source driver than from their closed-source driver. Ubuntu 16.04 comes with a version of the 4.4 kernel that has the 4.5 driver changes backported.

The driver that ships with Ubuntu is almost certainly old and even though the chip has enough raw computation power to run games the actual support may not be there.

For what it's worth, I've only ever run across one game that didn't work properly in Linux. Eador has badly fubared graphics and apparently the developer doesn't even care. He only did the Linux port to get on a Humble Bundle I think. It's a shame too because it is an interesting game, even if the developer has a somewhat insane notion of how long people are going to want to keep playing a single campaign.

Intel's linux driver isn't necessarily buggy, but doesn't support the same OpenGL version/extensions. If a game needs those, tough luck on Intel.

My brother's laptop has an Intel HD 4xxx (it might be 4440) and it works perfectly. Intel Linux drivers tend to be good in my experience.

There's no such thing as an Intel HD 4440, there's the common 4000 and 4400, and the less common 4200 and 4600. There are no other entries in the 4xxx series of Intel HD as far as I know.

So likely, your brother has a 4400.

I had Sandy Bridge and now I have Skylake CPU. Work fine most of the time, but crash on some games. I don't know why because error messages are usually ambiguous.

I also have Haswell on desktop with Windows, so maybe I can check these games on different systems.

My experience is that Intel cards produce more problems with OpenGL. But not related to Linux, same on Windows. Part of the reason might be that it's not so common for 3D developers to work with Intel cards so those are less tested.

The other side of the coin is that big name GPU manufacturers spend a lot of time working with game developers to fix issues both with the games and with their own drivers. You often see Day 0 driver updates that coincide with major game releases. This kind of constant test and refinement squashes a lot of bugs over the long term.

Intel doesn't do that. You basically get the driver that they originally wrote for your chip and that's it.

The best Intel iGPU I've found by far is the Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200, which came onboard my system76 galago pro. Runs perfectly on my Linux system, plays far more games than I could on my previous laptop (Intel HD 4400 as well, I think).

I even managed to play Borderlands Prequel(?) with a manageable frame-rate.

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