| the blog! | |
|---|---|
| Fri Mar 6 09:41:27 UTC 2026 | Graphics card broke, we playin' Morrowind now. |
|
So my graphics card went and died on me. Thankfully it should still be under warranty, but until that can get sorted I’m left with a bit of an interesting scenario. I still have integrated graphics, and as I learned from my Framework 13 last year, embedded GPUs have gotten shockingly capable since I last needed to rely on them in the days before the GTX 900 series.
A lot of my library consists of retro titles, both emulated and native (well, for Windows, at least.) For those inclined to clutch their pearls, legal precedent has been favourable toward emulation since Sony failed to take down Bleem! back in the 90s. So, since I’ve been experimenting with what I can pull out of this iGPU, I thought it’d make a fun blog post to track what has and hasn’t worked for me, and what my rotation in the meantime looks like. So, I’m certainly not playing any modern flagship titles. Life really seems like it doesn’t want me to finish Phantom Liberty. Another title in my previous rotation, Splitgate, is pretty much off the table too. I gave a session a try, and it certainly did its best to run, but my frame times were awful even on the lowest graphical settings, so that’s out of the picture. So, if I can’t play my current arena shooter pick, what about the classics? Halo CE: Anniversary in the Master Chief Collection (with the original Xbox graphics) runs at a smooth 120 FPS. It’ll do just the same with the 360-era graphics, but I have taste. The MCC still has a pretty lively player base, so I’ve fortunately had no trouble finding a multiplayer lobby while I'm limited to this nostalgic LAN party mainstay. Everything up to Reach appears to run this well, so I’ve decided it’s a good time to finally play through the series properly. Regrettably, I missed out on the Halo 2 and 3 hype back in the day. I’m fortunate to have grabbed the HD release of Jet Set Radio by BlitWorks back in 2018. It’s unfortunately de-listed everywhere I can find now, but it’s a great port that runs super smooth on PC. As it happens, I’d just recently finished my first proper play through of the game before my GPU died (16 year old me couldn’t beat Bantam Street, apparently), so I’ve taken this a sign to turn that into a completion run, because it runs great with this setup. If you haven’t played JSR, I absolutely recommend it. I ought to dedicate an entire post to it at some point; I just don’t consider myself a reviewer. One of my all-time comfort games conveniently happens to be Morrowind, and unsurprisingly a 2002 NetImmerse game can be handled just fine by this hardware. OpenMW absolutely earns praise here, too. It’s one of my favourite projects and it makes running this ancient title that much easier here. Realistically, this setup will likely also handle everything up until Skyrim just fine, though I haven’t deemed to check. I do regret having to wait to get back to my Oblivion Remastered play through, though. To finish off, virtually everything up to the sixth generation emulates great (that I own, at least.) I remember struggling with Wind Waker in Dolphin back in 2014 with a GTX 680M, so seeing both my thin-and-light laptop, and the integrated graphics off of my desktop’s Ryzen 5 7600X in the modern day has honestly been a pretty fascinating experience. A great deal of credit for that absolutely goes to the team working on Dolphin over the years, as well as the people behind Vulkan, which didn’t exist at the time. All the same, I frankly haven’t been hurting for titles to re-play. Wrapping up, integrated graphics have made gaming without a discrete graphics card surprisingly accessible, at least in my use case. I have no doubt many e-sports titles like Counter-Strike 2 would run just fine on this hardware as well, and that honestly leaves me to reflect on what someone on a tight budget could work with these days. Well… Maybe once memory prices stop going insane, at least. ( ._.) |
kibachee 2026 |