Sharing my Experience: Intel HD 1st Gen running games at full speeds

[SkepticalHippoh]

Hey there,

I've been lurking around Dolphin for quite some time now in an on and off manner trying to get my 1st generation Intel HD graphics card to run Zelda (big fan of the game) and New Super Mario Bros. Having my Wii die on me a couple of days back, I decided to backup my games on to my computer and give Dolphin another try, and to my surprise, I have actually managed to get it working with New Super Mario Bros. at full speeds.

I just thought that it would be nice to share my experience with other people, as they may appreciate it and it would get their dead Wii games a good use as well.

I'll begin with the specs:

OS: Windows 8 x64 (this have me a general performance boost in games of around +10FPS. May be a new driver for the Intel HD. Haven't looked into it too much)
Graphics Card: Intel HD 1st Generation. This is the graphics chip found on older generation of intel core iX cpu's.
CPU: Intel Core i3 m350
RAM: 3GB DDR3
Chipset: Intel HM57

Dolphin Version: Latest build of Vlads builds. Used this simply because it's Intel Friendly and I assumed it would have some speedups for Intel CPUs, which would mean my GPU could run faster as well.

Some information regarding Intel HD:

This is an integrated GPU, meaning it does not have its own dedicated RAM, unlike all those fancy nVidia and ATI cards. Not having dedicated RAM, means it has to share a single BUS with all the other stuff that is needed to pass on to your RAM, which makes it a lot slower than most GPUs and is the main reason why it is so crap. The trick is to have less data travel on that bus, making it faster for the GPU to handle everything. [I'm not an ace when it comes to this, so if anyone has anything to add, please, feel free to do so].

Getting the speed:

Enable all of the speed tweaks in Dolphin.
If your game seems to run fast, do not be afraid to mess around with the settings a little bit more to find the balance between quality and speed.

Decrease the resolution to the bare minimum and enable full screen mode.
It will make the game look pixelated, but you will be able to play it. The trick is, you will be pushing a lot less information on the BUS to travel, meaning it will get less clogged up. Do some testing with higher resolutions as well as I was able to get NSMB running on full speed on a 1366x768 full screen.

The Graphics Settings:

Intel HD Graphics has a really crappy control panel, but it has some nifty features inside it. What helped me was that I went on all performance instead of quality in the Intel HD Graphics settings. Combining this with low resolutions for games, it has boosted the performance by quite a bit. I have also found this blog post on how to boost Intel GMA cards quite useful.

Backup Wii Games:

I wanted to play the games that I already own, since my Wii has died on me. My DVD drive is rather slow in reading and I think it has passed its time and is ready to die any time now. I decided to back up all (well, most) of my games on to my HDD on my computer. This gives a decent performance boost as well as the reading speed is a lot better than you would read the disc from a DVD drive directly. I assume using and SSD would be even better.

By doing lots of research I have come across a software called GameBackupSystem, sure there were a couple of other ways that required to get additional hardware, but GameBackupSystem was just the most straightforward one of them all. You can check out the software here.

Games that I have tried and that were working at full speed:

New Super Mario Bros.:
1366x768 Resolution
Full Screen
All Speed Hacks Enabled

Mario Kart Wii:
Work in Progress

Zelda Twilight Princess:
Work in Progress


If anyone has any experience with games they would like to share, please feel free to respond to this topic and I will add them here.

[AnyOldName3]

You shouldn't have paid for the 'Game backup system' software. It will most likely have just included a copy of Friidump or Rawdump, both of which are free.

[NaturalViolence]

SkepticalHippoh Wrote:and I assumed it would have some speedups for Intel CPUs, which would mean my GPU could run faster as well.

How on earth did you reach that conclusion?

Quote:This is an integrated GPU, meaning it does not have its own dedicated RAM, unlike all those fancy nVidia and ATI cards. Not having dedicated RAM, means it has to share a single BUS with all the other stuff that is needed to pass on to your RAM, which makes it a lot slower than most GPUs and is the main reason why it is so crap. The trick is to have less data travel on that bus, making it faster for the GPU to handle everything. [I'm not an ace when it comes to this, so if anyone has anything to add, please, feel free to do so].

It's not just the shared memory that makes it bad. It's an extremely small and weak chip with very little processing power compared to AMD and Nvidia GPUs and terrible drivers. It also dedicated a large portion of the die space to pci-e controllers, memory controllers, dmi controllers, and 2D fixed function pipelines. So less than half the die space of this small chip is actually used for 3D processing. It was designed to be extremely cheap and have almost no power consumption. It's so slow that the shared memory bus probably isn't bottlenecking it at all. It's a separate die but is packaged along with the cpu inside the heatspreader. It has a slow DMI bus that connects it to the cpu and limits communication speed between the two but once again the chip is so god damn slow that this probably has no effect on performance. It does however reduce memory performance on the cpu side since the memory controllers are located on the IGP for some reason.

TL: DR: It's not the bus that's slow, it's the chip.

[SkepticalHippoh]

(02-11-2013, 06:17 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: You shouldn't have paid for the 'Game backup system' software. It will most likely have just included a copy of Friidump or Rawdump, both of which are free.

I've read that you need a special drive to backup your games if you use those. I didn't bother looking for one so just bought that. Doesn't look like it has RawDump in it though. Anyway, if it makes my life easier, $30 well spent

@NaturalViolence

Thanks for the input! That has cleared a lot of confusion that I had. I guess this would explain why it works better on lower resolutions as well? Eg. having to process much less data? Will try to add this to the first post once I get some time

Cheers!

[AnyOldName3]

You're just as likely to need a special drive, and I'm thinking you probably happened to have one.

Can I ask what model drive you have, and what the software required you to do? If this is free software being sold, then it's a possibility that someone, somewhere, is owed money/acknowledgement from GameBackupSystem.

[admin89]

In case you don't know , Intel HD bottleneck(slowdown) your CPU even at lowest settings (1xIR)