Intel HD Graphics enough for most (pretty much) full-screen Flash games?

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
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My wife's PC has a Pentium G620 and is using integrated graphics. The CPU usage on her machine when playing the Flash games she plays tends to be quite high (~80% or more a lot of the time), and some of the games judder enough to be distracting.

At the moment I'm wondering whether popping in a graphics card would be the best thing to do, or to replace the CPU with an Ivy Bridge i3 and use the G620 for the server rebuilt I have planned "soon". The i3 option wouldn't use as much power as even a basic graphics card would.

She doesn't really play any other games, except a Settlers game from this century as well as Settlers 3 :)
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
21,402
16,609
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Ok, I've found a couple of interesting things.

We both use Firefox on 64-bit versions of Windows (she's on Vista, I'm on 7).

On my PhII 960T (4 cores activated), I get about 50% CPU usage, and I used AfterBurner to monitor the GPU usage which was zero the vast majority of the time. Also, the animation of a game she likes to play ("Dragon City" on FB) was still choppy.

Ideally I would have liked to try it on Google Chrome on my machine as well, but since I don't have it installed, (and I hate it being installed because "Google Update" likes to link into everything it can, and is sometimes not removed when the program is removed), so I thought I'd try IE9.

Interestingly, I had similar processor usage on IE9, but the GPU was utilised quite a bit, and the gameplay was a little smoother.

So, I would tentatively draw a conclusion from this that the Flash plugin for Firefox is crap because it doesn't seem to use GPU acceleration (the Flash option for 'use hardware acceleration' is enabled), and I think I'll follow up with an IE9 test on her machine.

- edit - I enabled hardware acceleration in Firefox's options (which I normally have disabled because I hate what it does to the fonts in places), tried the same game again and found increased GPU usage, but I've also just noticed even trifling things now like typing are causing GPU usage spikes on my machines, so perhaps it wasn't the game that was causing the extra usage.
 
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palladium

Senior member
Dec 24, 2007
539
2
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I had issues with " GPU acceleration" on Flash myself (doesn't actually accelerate anything). Plus, the HD graphics on the i3 should make any "low end" discrete cards unnecessary.

What about giving your wife your 960T (get her a cheap card like a 6450 or something, and swap out the hard disks), and get yourself an i5-3570k instead? Everyone gets an upgrade that way :p
 

Arkaign

Lifer
Oct 27, 2006
20,736
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I had issues with " GPU acceleration" on Flash myself (doesn't actually accelerate anything). Plus, the HD graphics on the i3 should make any "low end" discrete cards unnecessary.

What about giving your wife your 960T (get her a cheap card like a 6450 or something, and swap out the hard disks), and get yourself an i5-3570k instead? Everyone gets an upgrade that way :p

Yep, I've actually had cases myself where I had to disable it for videos to play correctly on some PCs. Annoying as all getout. We can only hope that HTML5 speeds along and wipes Flash out soon. I think new Androids no longer have flash IIRC, and of course Apple said no way.
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
21,402
16,609
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She has to have an older version of Flash on hers (11.2) because the later versions on FF / Vista 64 on hers would just crash randomly and have rendering issues.

I'm using the latest Flash plugin on my setup without any problems, however that Dragon City game doesn't seem much different on Firefox on my PC than it does on hers, so I think that scrubs off the "not the latest Flash", "drivers", and "The G620 can handle Flash no problems" points.

I thought about a PC swap when I built hers earlier this year (a year or two after mine), but I didn't for the following reasons:

1 - I feel bad about giving her old hand-me-downs (her previous Athlon XP setup was almost entirely from my upgrades) rather than her getting something new sometimes.

2 - if I rebuilt hers and mine at the same time then there wouldn't be a single working desktop in the house and that could end very badly (I'm self-employed so my PC is for personal and business).

3 - I wanted hers to be as power efficient as possible, partly because hers tends to be on for quite long periods while she's at home, whereas when I go out on business my PC might get to sleep 3-4 times a day.

4 - while I'm not making use of the extra two cores (which I know to work) on my 960T, I'm more likely to make good use of them than she is, I'm fairly sure.

5 - doing a clean install of my computer is a lot more trouble than it is worth, and I don't fancy the idea of "throw in a completely different board and hope it works".

I would say that for people not playing almost-full-screen Flash games, the G620 is ok, today, but my wife abuses her PC a bit IMO (things like Firefox sessions that run for days or weeks on end, tonnes of tabs open all the time - and not just with one Flash clip overall), I think the G620 was a bit over-optimistic, however my thinking at the time was that she had done pretty well with the Athlon XP 2500+, though it increasingly was showing its age with regard to Flash.

I joked once that a Core i7 wouldn't be enough to take her Firefox abuse (memory usage is under control since she has 4GB, it has been easily enough so far, whereas memory usage was a serious problem on the previous setup), but I'm thinking that if the G620 has been pushed this much for "typical" usage already, it's not a good option in the long term (and we like to get say 6-8 years out of our setups before getting a new board*). I'm even considering a Core i5 for her but I'm not sure the finances are good for it.

I wish she would hurry up and try Dragon City on IE9 on her setup to see if it works any better. She doesn't seem to understand that fixing this sort of thing is my hobby and my work, so I like fixing things and learning more :)

* - and getting access to her PC to do upgrades is like getting blood from a stone, so the plan is "get it right, then hopefully I won't have to battle for it for years to come". Also bear in mind that I have to listen to the whining that her PC isn't working properly "but she doesn't want me to look at it".

I'm also wondering whether Firefox simply isn't up to the task, perhaps because of its poor multi-threading support.
 
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lyssword

Diamond Member
Dec 15, 2005
5,630
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I have g620, I have 0 issues with anything really (I am however using ati 5770). You sure there isn't some type of virus running? How much RAM? Also, in "power options" set to "performance".
Playing 3dgames while having 10 tabs of web/hd youtube playing is no problem. Angry birds (html 5) does get about 60% on both cores, but I've never had any performance issues w/ flash
 
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Insert_Nickname

Diamond Member
May 6, 2012
4,971
1,696
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Ok, I'll put down £90 which is what the Core i3 costs, I'll rely on the rest of this forum to get me the rest of the way to the 3770K :)

£160 to go...

If you're getting an i3 at least get a 3225 with HD4000... :)

Or if you're going for lowest possible power consumption get the 3220T. It should cost about the same as a regular 3220.

my 2c...
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
21,402
16,609
136
I have g620, I have 0 issues with anything really (I am however using ati 5770). You sure there isn't some type of virus running?

Yup.
How much RAM?
4GB, approximately 50% free.

Also, in "power options" set to "performance".
Why? SpeedStep does the job there.

Playing 3dgames while having 10 tabs of web/hd youtube playing is no problem. Angry birds (html 5) does get about 60% on both cores, but I've never had any performance issues w/ flash
Which browser? Also bear in mind what another person has already said about x264 being hardware accelerated (which I'm pretty sure includes YouTube).

To the other person who posted - is there any such thing as a 3220 with HD4000?

Isn't a 3220T a clocked-down 3220?
 
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Insert_Nickname

Diamond Member
May 6, 2012
4,971
1,696
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To the other person who posted - is there any such thing as a 3220 with HD4000?

Yep, its called the 3225, as ShintaiDK pointed out. :D

Isn't a 3220T a clocked-down 3220?

The T-models are essentially down-clocked versions of regular models with slightly lower vcore (that's the amount of voltage the CPU receives) that are guaranteed not to use more then 35W (45W for quad-cores) of power under full load. It also means that they are SLOWER then regular models, so they are a very niche product.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i5-2500t-2390t-i3-2100t-pentium-g620t_2.html#sect0

Quote:

"All this means that it doesn’t make sense to use energy-efficient Sandy Bridge modifications just for the sake of saving some power. Since in real life the processors are usually loaded sporadically, T-series won’t bring you power bill down a lot. These processors, however, offer you another indisputable advantage. If you need to limit the maximum power consumption and heat dissipation of your system, for example, if your system is assembled inside a case that can only accommodate a low-efficiency cooling system, or if you are using a low-capacity power supply unit. In this case Intel T-series processors may be truly irreplaceable.
However, power consumption and heat dissipation limitations do affect the performance quite significantly. In terms of peak computational performance, CPUs with 45 W and 35 W TDP on average work about 15-20% slower than the regular CPUs of the same class and price. However, in case of Core i5-2500T and Core i5-2390T, they will only fall that far behind under serious multi-threaded load. In all other cases, they will get a serious boost from their aggressive Turbo Boost technology. Another two T-series CPUs, Core i3-2100T and Pentium G620T, do not support Turbo Boost and fall far behind the fully-functional models in all cases."

Unquote

I think that sums it up nicely... :)
 

Denithor

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2004
6,298
23
81
Pick up the cheapest i5 quad you can find cheap/used.

I understand you're in the UK, may not have easy access to a used marketplace like we do here in the US, however worth looking. I recently picked up 3 used i5 2400 chips to upgrade a buddy's shop computers for $135-140 each. Add some cheap DDR3 memory and H61 boards and I'm talking about $200 for full upgrades to his machines (coming from old C2D systems, this was quite an improvement).
 

Obsoleet

Platinum Member
Oct 2, 2007
2,181
1
0
Using an Intel HD4000 to type this now and I highly recommend it for Settlers3 ect.

Unless you have a spare video card lying around (in which case I'd just use that), you'd have an efficient, slick setup with Ivy Bridge integrated.
 

Torn Mind

Lifer
Nov 25, 2012
12,086
2,774
136
I can confirm that the Celeron G550, which almost exactly the same as the G620(less l3 cache), is not adequate for Dragon City, at least in Firefox. I am using Linux Mint 12 with Firefox 17. Choppy.
 

Denithor

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2004
6,298
23
81
i5 2500K with stock HSF for £135 shipped:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Cor...Computing_CPUs_Processors&hash=item27ce373050

Didn't really see any better deals on lower end chips (today), if that's too high you can search around a bit more (look for i5 2300/2310/2320/2400/2500). Or you could try your luck with picking off an auction. I typically go for BIN versus auctions, especially when recommending a purchase to someone.

The advantage here would be a drop-in replacement for your existing motherboard with no need to repair or reinstall Windows. Just drop in the new chip and games should run nice and smooth.