On Board Intel HD Graphics Performance

Gaming Graphics tests 3D performance in a gaming context, something that the HD 3000 simply can't keep up in.

Onboard graphics are not meant for gaming. That might be one of the better onboard cards, but it is mostly meant for high resolutions for watching movies and such, not for gaming. Onboard cards do pull resources from the system to operate, but you wont ever get the performance you want as far as gaming from them as you would a card with its own board and dedicated ram. There are some games that are optimized for the intel HD3000, but its only a handful ( by handful i mean like 4 or 5). Get yourself a seperate video card and you will see very big gains as far as gaming power. Im sorry, but integrated graphics probably wont see significant power as far as gaming for a long time.

Intel's HD 3000 graphics core is a large step up from their previous integrated GMA solution. However, your expectations are a bit high.

Based on some Anandtech benchmarks, the Intel HD 3000 is a little more powerful than the Radeon HD 5450. I believe in one benchmark the Intel HD 3000 outperformed the HD 5450 by as much as 15% - 20%. This all sounds great until you consider the fact that the Radeon HD 5450 is not really targeted to gamers, but for multimedia purposes. At best the HD 5450 can be used to play games in low resolution with low graphics quality. The same can be said of the Intel HD 3000 graphics core.

This thread reminds me of another thread where the poster was disappointed that the Intel HD 3000 was not as fast as a Radeon HD 5770. If it were so, then AMD and nVidia would be in serious trouble because their graphics division make most of their money from value and mainstream video cards.

+1 - i found the exact information when i was researching the subject.

Actually there are ways to improve Intel HD Graphics performance. Among the best of them are updating the driver, making your computer's RAM work in dual channel mode and disabling the power saving features of Intel HD Graphics. For more information and detailed instructions, take a look at the following article:

3 Ways to Improve Intel HD Graphics Performance

Haha yeah I can't remember how many people I've read about who got screwed over because they thought the HD 5450 was a gaming card. I remember I was also suprised that my 8600 GT 256 mb totally destroyed that card gaming wise even though there were many years between them.