Is Intel i7-2600K integrated graphic card enough for gaming? [closed]

Question

My system has the core i7 2600K on Intel DZ68DB motherboard with integrated graphics 3000 support, no graphics card and 8gb RAM.Is there a need for me to buy a dedicated graphics to play games like NFS, FiFa, BattleField and Prince of Persia? Will my processor will be sufficient? I'm a newbie to the gaming world.

I used to play NFS hot pursuit on my Pentium 4 , FIFA and also Prince of Persia..I don't know much of the current games.

Answer

For any games you were playing on your Pentium 4, (if you were playing them without a graphics card) it should be sufficient.

For any newer game, you might just be able to get by (almost, and only if you are ok with non-smooth framerates) if you play them on the absolute lowest setting.

Here are some benchmarks, from early in the year (January, 2011), of the i7 w/ No graphics card, against some low-end ATI cards.

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Heroes VI graphical problem in third Necropolis mission

Question

In the third Necropolis mission, after I take the first Orc Stronghold, when I see the screen that says what artifacts I have won my graphics card appears to reset (both of my monitors reset) and after that the entire Heroes VI screen is invisible, so I cannot play. This happened exactly the same way again after I reloaded from a save. Can I avoid this and still defeat the Orcs?

This graphical glitch has happened before, but the other times it went away when I reloaded from the save.

Answer

Try changing/lowering your graphic-settings. Maybe this avoids the problem. Also updating the driver of the graphic-card is never a bad idea.

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Are there graphical Nethack clients that connect to public servers?

Question

So, there is the nethack.alt.org server where many users have gone and had their good times, using the text-based interface through a client such as PuTTY (or your favorite terminal client).

Anyway, I don't mind playing Nethack in console mode... However I do rather enjoy the graphical version far more. Are there any clients available that make use of graphical tilesets, and can connect to a public server?

Answer

I am hosting a public server which give the possibility to play a graphical nethack with tiles in a javascript frame. I am looking for people in order to try it. So you are welcome :) It's almost the same feeling as playing the windows/linux graphical version but with statistics and high-score online. And you have nothing to download.

http://newthack.com

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How to identify a game as 8-bit, 16-bit, …

Question

Is it possible to identify games (by their graphics ?) as 8-bit games or 16-bit games or whatever bits games use nowadays?

Answer

There is no set-in-stone definition of what "8-bit games" or "16-bit games" really means, so the answer to your question depends on your definition. See this related question.

• You can define them by the year they were released, which makes identifying which game belongs to which group is easy.
• You can define them by the color-range they use - meaning, you actually care about "8-bit-graphics" or "16-bit-graphics". In this case you basically need to count how many colors they use. 256 is 8-bit, 65k is 16-bit, etc. See Wikipedia's article on color depth.
• You can define them by the platform on which they were originally intended to run. This means you need to check the platform details. Early x86 games (such as most DOS games) are typically 16-bit, while N64 games are 64-bit. Many games are released to multiple platforms, though, which makes this tricky.
• If you define them by their gameplay, this is entirely up to you :)

In my experience, nowadays "8-bit" or "16-bit" usually refers to either the era in which the game was released, or its gameplay.

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Is it possible to play fine high graphic card recommended game on low graphic?

Question

In the past, I have wanted to play some games with high-end graphics requirements.

Why is it that I'm able to play videos of these games fine, but when I try to actually play the game on my laptop (which doesn't have a high-end graphics card), the game shows its power, and barely runs, if at all?

Can I do anything to run these games (which I can play videos of fine) on my low-power laptop? Why does this happen?

Answer

Videos and games are completely different. All the data for a video is pre-computed and stored, it just needs to be decoded and shown on-screen. On the other hand games produce images through the juxtaposition of stored images, freshly rendered images, and effects like lighting. This can be an extremely processor-intensive task.

There are also other considerations, like memory; a video doesn't need to store the position, orientation, pose, speed, etc. of characters, or buffer in upcoming areas, or anything like that.

For a real life analogy, imagine the difference between flipping through a photo book of a family gathering compared to actually gathering the family, doing all the same things, and re-creating the photos. The latter is like what the game has to do; the video is like the photo book.

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Graphical glitches

Question

I have graphical glitches when I play Street Fighter IV on PC.

Sometimes when I play, the 3D models are like leaking to or from nowhere. An image is worth a thousand words, isn't it. Please visit that IS gallery.

I'm wondering why this happens. Look under Sakura's skirt, on Chun Li's cheek or Dan's hand. It happens randomly.

Obviously I didn't have the problem in the beginning and then it happened but deeper than what you can see on the screenshots, then I changed my monitor because the previous died and it even happened on char select and vs screen (greenish and magenta dotted lines on 2D graphics) but now it seems it got better. I had to play over an hour to get these screens.

I preferred to play on windowed mode and now I play in full-screen mode.

My previous screen was displaying at 1280×1024 as far as I remember and the new one displays HD (1920×1080) so I bet it had to display Windows desktop AND the game graphics and the change of definition may have made some extra work to the GC. Maybe full-screen mode allows it to ease the GPU a bit.

Another thing that happens is the game quitting suddenly.

As I told earlier, my pc is quite old (it actually passes the minimum required config)
Athlon 64 3800+
1 GB of RAM
ATI Radeon x1600 Pro
Windows Seven x64

In short : why do these glitches happen and what are the solutions?

Answer

Sometimes even if it passed the minimum required configuration, you won't have a perfect gameplay. Some glitches like this may occur because of the small amount of RAM left to play the game and the graphic card can't handle it at all. Running Win7 on 1Gb of RAM .... seriously, you should consider putting more RAM since Win7 already needs that 1Gb of RAM to run in the background.

Win7 on 64 bit needs at least 2Gb of RAM minimum, so I think you should upgrade

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/products/system-requirements

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How to cap frame rate (or GPU usage) in Just Cause 2 PC?

Question

I play Just Cause 2 PC on my Radeon 4850 (single slot) and no matter how I tweak the graphic settings (from lowest to highest), Afterburner utility keeps telling me that JC2 is using ~99% GPU utilization.

At that level, R4850 temp could hit easily 100C, cranking the fan to maximum speed.

R4850 clock rate is 500/750 when idle and 625/993 when under load. Afterburner lets me cap with 500/750 under load but JC2 hogs the GPU nonetheless.

Can anyone suggest a way to cap my GPU in terms of GPU usage or frame rate?

BTW, I plan to buy a replacement in AMD's Southern Islands (R7XXX series) once it is out.

Answer

Add to the game's command line parameters: /frameratecap=n where n is the frame rate.

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Will “Alice Madness Returns” run on a 2010 MacBook Pro?

Question

Does any of you have experience with "Alice Madness Returns" on a 2010 MacBook Pro (Windows7 running)? I look forward to buying this game, but are not sure if it will run.

related: How is the look and feel (especially the controlling) of the XBox360 version?

Answer

I don't have any experience with Macs, so I can't say if Bootcamp / etc makes games not work as well as on a non-Mac, but looking at the hardware, your CPU and RAM are more than sufficient.

The bottleneck in your machine will be the graphics card. According to Notebookcheck, its roughly equivalent to a Quadro FX 3500M, which I have in a laptop of mine, and is definitely better than a desktop GeForce 7600, which is the minimum requirement of the game.

Basically, provided your drivers are up to date, the game should run, but you'll probably have to lower some settings to keep it smooth and playable.

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