Intel HD 3000 is really enough for gaming?

[userngalan]

i was wondering if i have to purchase a mid-range video card because Intel says "Intel Sandybridge Graphics 3000 delivers immersive and casual mainstream gaming capabilities with entry-level discrete graphics card performance without an additional graphics card or chip."

 

[lupinesithlord]

beats the pants off of a geforce 7600 gt

 

[das_stig]

Should be ok for anything that came out for XP that doesn't involved serious heavy duty graphics.

 

[pckitty4427]

Intel HD graphics 3000 has about the same power as the best nVIDIA GPUs of around 2005-2006. I wouldn't use it for any new games (except maybe 2D games).

This should help: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-radeon-geforce,3018-7.html

 

[amirp]

if you want to play any game... buy any video card out today for almost any price and it will beat the intel HD3000. In other words it is useless for gaming other than maybe warcraft 3 lol.

what is your budget, and what type of games are you looking to play?

 

[jaguarskx]

The Intel HD 3000 is marginally faster than a Radeon HD 5450 and probably around 25% - 30% faster than a GTS 210.

Should be suitable to low resolution and low graphics settings. My 1366x768 resolution IdeaPad Y470 has a nVidia GT 550M graphics card, but I decided to play around with the Intel HD 3000 graphics core.

Setting all graphic settings to low and no anti aliasing I was able to get between 18FPS - 24FPS most of the time in Chapter 2 - Relic. Playable, but not ideal. I am guessing the final battle on the aircraft carrier would be pretty close to a slide show. Fallout 3 was playable with a mix of low and medium settings. Not bad, but not ideal. Mass Effects was sluggish when there were a lot of people around like at the beginning of the game when on the bridge of the Normandy. Combat was... okay I suppose.

Note: Right out of the box Fallout 3 does not work with integrated graphic cores like the Intel GMA 4500 and Intel HD 3000. The D3D9.dll file originally developed for Oldblivion must be used in order to start the game.