Some of our users have the bad luck of having a laptop with Intel 4th generation graphics.  This is the last generation of the “GMA” graphics cores – they generally come on motherboard (and often you’ll have one that you don’t use even if you have a PCIe graphics card) and they’re not very powerful.  Motherboard graphics are designed to lower the cost of the entire computer for users who don’t need 3-d.  They are not designed to make X-Plane look awesome.

These GPUs are causing two problems with X-Plane 10.10:

  • They crash on startup when we ask the driver about our window’s format.  Why it does that is not yet clear to me, but there may be a work-around.
  • Our shaders won’t run on the GPU, which claims we ran out of texture units.

I consider this second problem very silly, as the card tells us how many texture units it has, the number is the same as every other GPU, and we don’t use more than those numbers.  There may not be a work-around to the second problem; in particular if the shader compiler has a bug that causes it to misunderstand our shaders, we won’t be able to do anything.

So at this point X-Plane compatibility with the gen-4 Intel GPUs is an unknown.  It looks like there are subtle core differences within the series that may also cause problems.

I can tell you this: if we ever get them running, it’s not going to be pretty or fast.  I have the 6th generation GPUs (Intel HD graphics in an i5-2500) and the performance is not on the same planet as a discrete GPU.

Other Intel Cores

We do not support the 3rd generation and earlier GMA GPUs.  The numbering scheme is really nutty, so that table can help.

We do support “Intel HD” graphics – they’re not great, but they do run.  That includes any built-in mobo GPU from a “core i5” or “core i7” chip.

TL;DR

The short version is: if you have a gen-4 Intel GPU and see crashing, please stand by; we are investigating now.  We will either fix the crash and provide a work-around in the upcoming 10.20 patch or declare the GPU unusable.  I’ll post an update in a few days.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

4 comments on “Fourth Generation Intel Graphics”

  1. Hi Ben,

    While using the Intel HD Graphics 2000 on that you have, does X-Plane display the HDR option in render settings? Does this option come up in HD Graphics 3000 or 4000?

    1. No – no HDR. The driver doesn’t export the GPU shader 4 extension, so the sim doens’t even try.

      And honestly, the GPU isn’t there. It has no instancing, so frame rates are just awful on all fronts. If I dumb the graphics down enough to get 25 fps at 1024 x 768 window (this does _not_ look good) and then go to 1920 x 1200 full screen, I have 15 fps with no aliasing. So there’s no way this GPU has enough fill rate to do HDR.

      NB: everything above applies to the Windows Intel HD driver.

  2. My G41 ran the x-plane demo up to about version 10.03 final.

    Of course I had to turn everything right down and fly out of Vancouver!

    Earlier you wrote that L2 cache is the limiting factor in x-plane. Does this mean that it is best to spend more on CPU than GPU ?

    eg. i7-3770 ($298) with GTX630 ($68) – that is a 4:1 ratio….?

    1. Yeah – I have confirmation now that the Gen-4 graphics _did_ run X-Plane 10.05 and earlier. I’m still trying to sort out what’s going on with that. We may just have been lucky in how our older shaders compiled…

      Re: CPU, I cannot answer that, and I do not think there is any clear correlation between money and performance across different part categories.

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