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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

While these aren't "extreme PC gaming" by any stretch of the imagination, I love how powerful these modern integrated graphics are.

These RDNA iGPUs and the Meteor Lake Arc graphics are going to be the baseline that a lot of kids with hand-me-down laptops are going to end up with.

And when they inevitably will go onto whatever replaces reddit in the next 5y and ask "can I play X on this", a lot of the time, the answer will be "yes, kind of".

I believe these integrated graphics may do more for PC gaming than all those $2000 graphics cards ever did.

They'll make PC gaming accessible to more people, who have been priced out of the market for years now.

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Yes, exactly! These new integrated graphics chips are great for 1080p 60hz for the games kids actually play, like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, CSGO, etc.

Integrate graphics will be the default in the future with discrete GPUs used only by the niche gamers and AI developer.

Lowest common denominator consoles like the Series S and Steam Deck are also contributing to this push as gamedevs are forced to optimize for integrated AMD graphics.

Now that is some out-of-touch thinking. The GPU industry is only going to expand more to the AI area, but the gaming area is going to keep making money for the same exact reason that it does now, players bragging, being envious, and the good old FOMO. Ain't no discreet graphics on a CPU going to make a dent in it, until they start selling them with marketing like "it comes with RTX 4080 included".

Disagree.

We are reaching a point where these integrated graphics are "good enough". Something that wasn't possible before.

It is going to change the gaming landscape.

This will still exist for sure, but for a lot of the gaming demographic, buying high end GPUs is simply not realistic anymore.

Unfortunately lots of games, especially indie ones, don't optimize for IGPUs at all.

I had a 13500K, and I've played many not-so-demanding games which I should expect at least 30fps at lowest video setting, while in reality I have something like 5fps.

Maybe for older titles. But in the last 2 years Indies have been forced to optimize for iGPUs because of the Steam Deck.

I think this is mostly because iGPUs were quite bad (even if they would have been good enough for some low-end indie games).

But that perception has shifted over the past few generations, especially on the AMD side, but increasingly also on the Intel side (and given the new Arc integrated graphics perform similarly to and sometimes even better than the current top end 780M, this trend should continue).

Things like GPU scarcity and increasing prices have obviously also contributed to this.

The pipelines of developing a videogame are quite long, so we are only now seeing releases of a lot of titles that have been developed against these new realities. And especially for indie titles, they don't see a lot of optimization after release, since the studios typically don't have the budget / staff to improve existing titles and work on new ones at the same time.

>who have been priced out of the market for years now.

Looking in the market for a PC rig (used), and I'm wondering about the state of used GPUs. I recall the consensus years ago was used GPU are useless since they were being (over)used for crypto mining -- but I wonder if this argument a) is still valid now and b) shouldn't that substantially reduce the GPU costs?

The argument was never particularly valid in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFytB3bb1P8

I think you’re partially right. However, big AAA engines will want all that $2000 worth of GPU if they have it available. The difference could be Cyberpunk 2077 on RDNA vs Cyberpunk 2077 on RTX.

I think we’ll see more and more RTX style GPU architectures become integrated as NVidia et al push AI cards on us next year. It won’t be crazy to see 512GB GPU ram with 64GPU cores in the next 5-10 years.

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