HD 4000 on the Surface Pro, good enough to game?

[Lundon44]

I've used the Intel HD Graphics 4000 on a few laptops and while it's decent for being an integrated GPU I don't think it will do well for games at 1080p.

In comparison to the HD 3000, the integrated GPU now has a larger cache as well that is shared with the CPU L3, but how much cache it has will be dependent on the Ivy Bridge CPU. The HD 4000 has upgraded the video decoder (MFX), increasing the number of execution units from 12 to 16 and adding support for DirectX 11 Shader Model 5.0.

Gaming benchmarks can be seen here: Intel HD Graphics 4000 Benchmarked - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

Sadly, the bad news is none of the top recent games are playable at 1080p at mid to high graphic settings. A few may be playable on low. The good news though is Fifa '13 should run smooth at decent settings!

 

[tissotti]

I'm not even tricking myself that my Transformer Book or Surface Pro will be for gaming, anyways i got my brand new assembled PC for that.
Of course it would be cool to be able to play some half serious games on my 11.6" inch ~12mm thin tablet.

I believe there would be option for i7 version of Transformer Book with discrete graphics? Though the price of that would likely be insane, as would the battery drain.

 

[VagrantWade]

You are going to have to give us some of the games you plan on playing. Because there are a lot of games that will play fine, and some that won't.

 

[Lundon44]

Well the kind of games that would be very cool to enjoy on a thin tablet (since we can use our 360 controllers) would of course be some of the same games available on the xbox 360.. Black Ops 2, any sports games, Streetfighter, Dishonoured.. etc.

I realised some less graphically intensive games like Limbo should run fine but it would be cool to not have to lug my 15lb Alienware laptop around everytime I want to game on the go.

 

[Reflexx]

Well the kind of games that would be very cool to enjoy on a thin tablet (since we can use our 360 controllers) would of course be some of the same games available on the xbox 360.. Black Ops 2, any sports games, Streetfighter, Dishonoured.. etc.

I realised some less graphically intensive games like Limbo should run fine but it would be cool to not have to lug my 15lb Alienware laptop around everytime I want to game on the go.

Sorry. You're going to have to lug around that big heavy laptop with a GeForce or Radeon graphics card if you want to play those kinds of games.

 

[theefman]

Well the kind of games that would be very cool to enjoy on a thin tablet (since we can use our 360 controllers) would of course be some of the same games available on the xbox 360.. Black Ops 2, any sports games, Streetfighter, Dishonoured.. etc.

I realised some less graphically intensive games like Limbo should run fine but it would be cool to not have to lug my 15lb Alienware laptop around everytime I want to game on the go.

Possibly we could see better games built specifically for the WinRT framework but regular console/PC games wont be playable on the HD4000.

 

[power5]

No chance of any top end game playing at 1080p on a surface pro.

 

[power5]

http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

 

[Nataku4ca]

if you really want to use integrated graphic for gaming you should wait for end of next year, intel apparently is ramping up heavily on the abilities of their integrated graphic on Haswell (next gen processors) and the power envelope seem pretty aggressive so you might get even better battery life

 

[power5]

Integrated graphics processors will probably never have enough power to handle top end current generation games at 1080p. If games stopped evolving now, sure in 5 years you may be able to play bf3 at 1080p.