Computer Hope

I play Age of Empires 2 HD with one of my friends and he told me that he plays his games on an inexpensive desktop without a graphics card. I have another friend who tells me she plays Sims 3 on a $400 laptop. It got me wondering about what games can be enjoyed on cheaper computers without discrete graphics cards. Personally, I have played some casual, light weight games, such as Plants vs Zombies and Tetris on old laptops back in 2007-2011. I have also played NES, SNES, and N64 emulators on cheap laptops without a GPU. Is there a hierarchy for integrated graphics? Are some integrated graphics more powerful than others? Can some integrated graphics handle light weight games better than others? Here's a list of some games I'm wondering about playing on cheaper computers without a GPU.

Gemcraft 2 Chasing Shadows
Dungeon Warfare
Metal Slug 3
Metal Slug X
Cat Quest
Papers, Please
Stanley Parable
Doki Doki Literature Club
Plants vs. Zombies
NES, SNES, N64 emulators
Arcade classics: Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Galaga, Tetris

Integrated Graphics on systems with Intel, AMD, and nVidia graphics have been pretty good for entry level games since around 2009. My fiance plays SIMS 3 on a 8th Generation Core i3 Laptop with the Intel HD Graphics and that laptop was $429 when new 3 years ago. I have an electron sipper desktop build that has a mobile APU which is an AMD A8-5545m quadcore with 1.7 to 2.7Ghz CPU speed where it runs at 2.4 to 2.7Ghz Turbo enabled most of the time and the Radeon HD 8510G built into the APU is powerful enough to play games like World of Warcraft at Normal ( Middle slider ) graphics details at 40-60 fps as well as most of my Steam Games without issues. I have since installed a nVidia Quadro K2000 as for while this Video Card isnt really a gaming video card and came out of a server with a pair of them for medical processing they are better than the APU's GPU and so I can go with Ultra settings in WoW now and they were free and dont require a 12V molex connection like high end gaming cards yet the benchmark is the equivalent of a nVidia GTX 260 but at lesser power consumption and some differences in shaders etc but the 2GB DDR5 is perfect for a gaming card. the Biostar Motherboard that came with the A8-5545m APU in it was only $79.99 and I already had DDR3 RAM and all other components from DOA systems that I gut for good parts and so I was able to build that system up very cheaply with 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM as a set of 2 x 4GB sticks.

The way games are these days its best to get a system that meets the system requirements for a game, however you can buy the game and install it and see how it plays. You might find that the APU or integrated on motherboard GPU is plenty for whatever the game is, however if you go for games that require a gaming rig you might find yourself buying a video card, but you might just need to get a video card and a power supply to drive the 12 volt needs of it and wattage as many games are more so GPU intensive and less CPU intensive and so for example a friend of mine has a lower end modern Intel Pentium that is paired with a GTX 780 ti and 600 watt power supply and it plays all his games very well. But if you look at the CPU utilization the cores are pegged at 100% use in games, but no noticeable lag gaming. So its fine to have a CPU running full tilt as long as temperatures stay below the maximum suggested temperature for that CPU by manufacturer. 100% CPU utilization though usually equals a bottleneck eventually to the video card not able to run at peak performance and so a benchmark run on the system if the benchmark shows the GPU performing worse than others who have tested that video cards GPU it can be the result of the video card bottlenecked by the CPU to which point a CPU upgrade to a Core i3 or Core i5 would fix that depending on budget or if you have plenty of money to spend get the fastest performing Core i7 for the Intel board and remove the bottleneck issue.

Thank you for your reply Dave

No problem and correction to SIMS its actually SIMS 4 that she plays not SIMS 3, so more demanding of graphics yet it plays with no lag.