Graphics card died, X4 run on integrated graphics

[Falcrack]

My GTX 1060 6 GB card died. That left me running all my stuff using integrated graphics from my i7-7700K (HD 630 integrated graphics), with 16 GB RAM. Surprisingly, setting everything to lowest graphics and running at 1920x1080, I still get around 25-30 fps flying around. Game still boots up, I can control my empire etc. Not ideal of course, but it seems better than nothing! Skyboxes and planets take forever to load when entering new sectors, they eventually get loaded though. I'm not seeing the graphical artifacts I saw running X4 using a GTX 960 2 GB card, I think because the integrated graphics is just using my more than sufficient amount of onboard RAM for this task.

I keep getting surprised at all the games that I own that run surprisingly well with integrated graphics, as long as I am willing to turn some graphics settings down a notch or ten.

[beko]

Interesting. Sorry for that dead GPU oc.

I may try this too. CPU is water cooled and hot anyway and I'm basically melting here in the summertime already

[Falcrack]

Interesting. Sorry for that dead GPU oc.

I may try this too. CPU is water cooled and hot anyway and I'm basically melting here in the summertime already

I wouldn't recommend running without a 3+ GB graphics card if you don't have to though!

[Matthew94]

That's cool. It does emphasise how CPU bound the game is though. At times I dream of spluging on an i9 just for the single thread performance. Maybe in another life.

[Falcrack]

That's cool. It does emphasise how CPU bound the game is though. At times I dream of spluging on an i9 just for the single thread performance. Maybe in another life.

Don't worry about getting an i9 for single threaded performance. My i7-7700K may be a few years old, but the very best i9 on the market today is hardly any better than that in terms of single threaded performance, or even dual core performance, which is probably what matters most for X4.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/I ... 4071vs3647

[Ebany]

That's cool. It does emphasise how CPU bound the game is though. At times I dream of spluging on an i9 just for the single thread performance. Maybe in another life.

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3900X and RTX2080 Super on my main computer while running an i9 965 and a GTX980 on the older one. Game runs surprising well of the i9 even though its about 12 years old now. On the Ryzen 9 I have to keep the game on FXAA otherwise it's stutters like crazy.

[Falcrack]

That's cool. It does emphasise how CPU bound the game is though. At times I dream of spluging on an i9 just for the single thread performance. Maybe in another life.

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3900X and RTX2080 Super on my main computer while running an i9 965 and a GTX980 on the older one. Game runs surprising well of the i9 even though its about 12 years old now. On the Ryzen 9 I have to keep the game on FXAA otherwise it's stutters like crazy.

Are you sure it is an i9 965? I don't see that such a processor exists. Is it an i7 965? The i7 965 should be significantly worse than the Ryzen 9 3900X...

[Imperial Good]

The issue is that X4 is already memory bottlenecked. Hence running it on integrated graphics will just make the problem even worse as now most of the memory bandwidth is being used by the IGPU. Once most of the memory bandwidth is being used, memory access latency will increase and single thread performance will drop.

Of course laptops using HBM#, LPDDR4 or future LPDDR5 will be affected less since those offer higher memory bandwidth and better timings than conventional DDR3 or DDR4 memory.

On the Ryzen 9 I have to keep the game on FXAA otherwise it's stutters like crazy.

Possibly GPU limited seeing how anti-aliasing is making a difference. I use a Ryzen 9 3900X and do not have noticeable stutter.

[Ebany]

That's cool. It does emphasise how CPU bound the game is though. At times I dream of spluging on an i9 just for the single thread performance. Maybe in another life.

I'm running a Ryzen 9 3900X and RTX2080 Super on my main computer while running an i9 965 and a GTX980 on the older one. Game runs surprising well of the i9 even though its about 12 years old now. On the Ryzen 9 I have to keep the game on FXAA otherwise it's stutters like crazy.

Are you sure it is an i9 965? I don't see that such a processor exists. Is it an i7 965? The i7 965 should be significantly worse than the Ryzen 9 3900X...

typo. Bloomfield CPU, first of the i7's and still my little baby. Have a first gen Silverstone Raven case, heavily moddifed so I don't want to let it go without a fight

[Ebany]

On the Ryzen 9 I have to keep the game on FXAA otherwise it's stutters like crazy.

Possibly GPU limited seeing how anti-aliasing is making a difference. I use a Ryzen 9 3900X and do not have noticeable stutter.

Run yours on MSAA 8x? I have screen space reflection on low, most other settings on high. If I set MSAA high then I only get a few hours of play before stutter. Multi-sample is nice but not worth the performance hit.

[Imperial Good]

Run yours on MSAA 8x? I have screen space reflection on low, most other settings on high. If I set MSAA high then I only get a few hours of play before stutter. Multi-sample is nice but not worth the performance hit.

Pointless even trying as I am GPU limited. The GTX 760 really struggles at times.

[tomchk]

I feel like some combination of Windows May 2020 update, latest Vulkan Nvidia drivers, and 3.3 has helped performance on low spec hardware a lot. I tried the game on my i5-3xxx with GTX750Ti and it was way better than it used to be!

[Falcrack]

Just as an update, I gave my graphics card another try. I had been getting black screens every so often when the graphics card came under heavy load for a while, but I could still use it just fine during times when it was not being stressed. I had assumed it was a graphic card issue, and did not get this issue when I removed the graphics card and just used onboard graphics.

But I reasoned that another possible reason for the black screens might be due to my PSU starting to go bad and not my graphics card. So I ordered a new PSU (600W Thermaltake, previous PSU was 500W Corsair), and so far, I haven't had the black screen issue come back after stressing it for a while. So maybe my graphics card wasn't bad after all! We'll see though, I'll stress it some more and see if I can get it to reproduce the issue using the new PSU. I also got 4 new case fans, so my case is as breezy as can be to dissipate heat.

i7-7700K
GTX 1060 6 GB
16 GB DDR4 RAM

[tomchk]

Good move. XR killed one of my PSUs and the GPU was fine. I bet the failing component is often the PSU. Did you get an ok price? I hear those are crazy pricey now.

[Falcrack]

Good move. XR killed one of my PSUs and the GPU was fine. I bet the failing component is often the PSU. Did you get an ok price? I hear those are crazy pricey now.

$54.99 for the 600W PSU. I noticed the good ones were a bit pricey. But I figured it was the cheaper option to try a new PSU than getting a new graphics card, if in fact a failing PSU was the culprit. Besides, if I was going to get a new graphics card, I would have wanted to upgraded to something like a RTX 2060, and I was not confident at all that my 500W PSU would handle it.