Intel HD intergrated graphics card improvement

[maceemiller]

Hi all. Firstly, if I have posted this in the wrong place, please move

OK, so today has been a complete success imo. I managed to really get the best out of my laptops Intel HD graphics card to a point where I have the graphics settings turned up to the max where before I was limited to low settings. The planets and rockets have never looked so good (apart from my gaming PC which I dont use much due to space restrictions in my house so I use my laptop mostly).

Heres my laptop specs:

Acer Aspire 5733:

Intel Core i3 CPU M380 @2.53Ghz

8GB RAM

Intel HD Graphics:

Physical memory 7862MB

Minimum graphics memory 128MB

Maximum graphics memory 1760MB

Processor - Intel64 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5

Processor speed 2527MHZ

I am no tech head so Im not sure about many of the above stats but I wanted to see if I could improve its performance so I Googled away and came across a video on YouTube. I followed it exactly upto the part where it goes on about installing Razor Game Booster (I didnt want that) and fired up KSP ramped up the graphic settings to max and tested.....

Whoa! What a huge difference! I have never seen Duna's dust clouds before and the Mun looked stunning. I did also notice quite an improvement in my FPS, especially when moving the camera around my space station in orbit around Kerbin which before this was very jerky.

If any other Intel HD users would like to try this the link is below. I would be really interested to see if it improves your KSP experience as it has mine

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cCxH8wRsNs

[Vanamonde]

As this is not about the game itself, the thread has been moved to the off-topic lounge.

[Whizzkid]

-snip-

Looks cool! Will have to try this on my brothers laptop as he gets a bad fps on most games, including KSP.

Well done for finding this, have some rep

[maceemiller]

Thanks man im just doing a simple launch, land on mun, take off from mun , goto minmus and land, take off and go home and on arrival to the mun it looked brilliant with textures, scatterer, full res etc maxed out. Well happy

[sal_vager]

Something like this is immensely useful to Intel GPU owners, I may link it in the self support thread.

[maceemiller]

Something like this is immensely useful to Intel GPU owners, I may link it in the self support thread.

Thankyou very much I really want this to help others as integrated HD graphics are not the best, yet this far surpassed my expectations.

[Elthy]

According to the description "Contig" is a defragmentation program. How is that helping with perfromance in games? It may help with loadingtimes on HDDs, but who installs games there anyway?

Edit: Ok, i watched the whole video. How is any of this increasing perfromance? The guy in the video doesnt seem to know what he is doing, everything looks quite random. Updated drivers are no miracle and anything else just looks quite useless (or is Win8 realy set to run background tasks with higher prority?). And how is that game booster thing working? It looks like it just increases the prority of some tasks, or is it auto overclocking the CPU/GPU?

Edited August 23, 2015 by Elthy

[LordFerret]

I find his audible mouse clicks highly annoying.

I'll agree with Elthy above ^

This video has the guy making a lot of comments about "I don't know what this is/does", which should have alarm bells ringing in your head. He turns off system event collection and logging... not a swift idea. And unless you know what you're doing (which it seems to me he doesn't), messing with your swap file is not a smart move either... incorrect swap file settings can actually slow your system down, among other problems.

The one thing I do agree with is keeping ones drivers up to date. Most people will find that, even with a brand new computer, there are driver updates for nearly all hardware on your machine.

[maceemiller]

Im no tech guy as I said before, but this seriously worked on my machine and its still set up the same way with no problems in anything I do on it. No harm in trying it and seeing if it improves your machine. It can always be reverted

[Auriga_Nexus]

Hmm... I think the defragging won't help on laptops using SSD's, but on the other hand increasing the paging file size for the SSD's may help prevent memory leak crashes. Other than that, disabling other services will definitely help.

In my case the real issue is that until KSP officially supports 64-bit Windows I'm kind of up .... creek without a paddle. I have 8 GB of RAM at my disposal, but can only use 4 for KSP, and since I'm running a heavily modded game I get massive amounts of lag and crashes. I may try some of the other tips though to see if things improve. Edited November 25, 2015 by Auriga_Nexus

[Camacha]

Quote

Hmm... I think the defragging won't help on laptops using SSD's

Defragging a SSD is a bad idea.

 

Quote

No harm in trying it and seeing if it improves your machine. It can always be reverted

I am not sure I fully agree with that one. Give people good advice or no advice, but do not send them on some 'see what happens' adventure.

Edited February 4, 2016 by Camacha

[maceemiller]

On 26/11/2015 at 0:08 AM, Camacha said:

[quote name='Auriga_Nexus']Hmm... I think the defragging won't help on laptops using SSD's

Defragging a SSD is a bad idea.

[quote name='maceemiller']No harm in trying it and seeing if it improves your machine. It can always be reverted :)

I am not sure I fully agree with that one. Give people good advice or no advice, but do not send them on some 'see what happens' adventure.

If you have Intel graphics,  it improves the game. No adventure intended.

[StrandedonEarth]

On 7/30/2015 at 9:33 AM, maceemiller said:

Intel HD Graphics:

Intel HD what? My i7 laptop has Intel HD 4000 (backed up by nVidia GeForce GT 630m), while the i3 desktop I got for my boys with airmiles has an Intel HD 4400 (and only that). I might want to try this on the desktop

[Wjolcz]

The YT link redirects to the main KSP Forum site.

EDIT: I am an idiot... Copied and pasted it directly.

BTW Am I the only one who doesn't see any difference when using the Razer Game Booster?

Edited February 2, 2016 by Veeltch

[Wjolcz]

Eh, I can't say I am visibly experiencing higher FPS, to be honest. Maybe it's just my laptop being crap and there's no way to squeeze any better performance out of it.

[NeMeSiS]

10 hours ago, Veeltch said:

Eh, I can't say I am visibly experiencing higher FPS, to be honest. Maybe it's just my laptop being crap and there's no way to squeeze any better performance out of it.

The only thing that would measurably improve your FPS would be changing the driver settings to performance, makes everything look like a blurry mess though. All the other stuff does nothing, or only helps if you are out of RAM.

[Wjolcz]

1 minute ago, NeMeSiS said:

The only thing that would measurably improve your FPS would be changing the driver settings to performance, makes everything look like a blurry mess though. All the other stuff does nothing, or only helps if you are out of RAM.

That's what I did and that's how it looked.

[NeMeSiS]

Well, i said measurably and you said visibly, so i guess we are both right. Integrated graphics just suck for gaming, the only thing that helped for me on my laptop was lowering the subdivision of the Kerbin oceans in the ksp settings.cfg. With graphics on mid-low it runs almost acceptable. 

Ive pretty much given up on gaming on my laptop anyway, thats what i got a desktop for.

[Camacha]

On 02/02/2016 at 1:10 AM, maceemiller said:

If you have Intel graphics,  it improves the game. No adventure intended.

There is not much to support that claim. The guy in the clip hardly seems to know what he does.

[problemecium]

I've tried Razor Game Booster and other similar software before, and found that it only subtly improved performance while driving my CPU core up to over 100°C... which I presume is bad.

[maceemiller]

On 02/02/2016 at 0:51 AM, StrandedonEarth said:

Intel HD what? My i7 laptop has Intel HD 4000 (backed up by nVidia GeForce GT 630m), while the i3 desktop I got for my boys with airmiles has an Intel HD 4400 (and only that). I might want to try this on the desktop

Intel HD 4000. Time to kill this thread. It improved my KSP experience on my laptop. Regardless of if it works for anyone else or not I only wanted to share it. Nothing ventured nothing gained so no loss either way

[Camacha]

2 hours ago, maceemiller said:

Time to kill this thread. It improved my KSP experience on my laptop.

You feel it improved the experience. Did you actually measure things?

Also, quickly closing a thread when people question your story is not a great way of dealing with things. It is only reasonable for people to want to know whether this actually works. Closing the thread disallows any discussion and any stories of success.

[maceemiller]

Fair point. The 2 main differences I experienced were improved graphics and smoother gameplay. It also has improved my gaming on rFactor with the same results.