Bad gaming performance with Intel HD 4000

Newbie Corner
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#1

Hi there,

Unfortunately I'm stuck with an Intel HD4000 for playing my games. For some games it works great, but for others it's incredibly slow (even for games that should easily run).

Is this simply because the GPU drivers aren't really made for this purpose? Or are there some ways to improve gaming performance?

Thank you!!

Examples of games that run as expected:
Flatout 2 - Native/GOG
Cities: Skylines - Native/Steam

Examples of games that run badly:
Saints Row 4 - Native/Steam
NFS Underground 2 - Wine/Disc

#2

Intel 4000 gaming performance blows. Cities: Skylines is more CPU bound so the GPU won't make a huge difference, Flatout 2 came out 14 years ago wasn't particularly demanding at the time and will run on virtually anything. The others are going to be held back by the GPU, I wouldn't expect you to be doing much above 720p low for anything vaguely modern on that chip. I don't know how much ram you have but keep in mind that the APU will be relying on that for GPU memory, so if it's 8gb or less you're going to struggle with anything less than a few years old.

You could try running your native games through Proton instead as they often perform better, ensuring the CPU governor is set to 'performance', or removing tlp all together if battery life isn't a concern, and of course lowering in game settings (particularly things like texture quality, resolution, shadows, anti-aliasing which can really gobble up memory). Doing that might help a bit, but you'll have to keep your expectations in check.

1 Like
#3

My experience with Saints Row 4 is that the native version has a somewhat broken OpenGL port which only seems to perform quite ok with Ubuntu or LSI. I highly suggest to use proton for this game as it will increase the experience drastically.

#4

How much RAM do you have?

#5

I have 12GB of RAM. Not great, but slightly better than 8GB I suppose.

I always try lowering the settings, but on the lowest settings it performs just as bad as on Medium to High (in case of Saints Row 4 and NFS Underground 2). I'm unsure what that means, gaming performance isn't my expertise.

Using Proton and turning off TLP are great ideas. Didn't think about it yet, might definitely be worth a shot.
I don't really care much about battery life, battery still does a great job. I'm more concerned about temps, it runs way too hot on high loads. It's a very old laptop which doesn't help my case either.

I'll give it a shot when I have some time, and will let yis know if it helped. Thank you so much for yer input!!!

#6

Saints Row 4 - Native/Steam- Runs terrible on my hardware as well and I have 16 gigs system ram and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics with 4 gigs of ram. I use the proton version

#7

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