Even dropping the resolution setting down to 1600x900 couldn’t guarantee me 60 fps performance. Selecting the “Low” preset instead helped considerably, giving me an average framerate of 30-40 fps, but it would still dip below that when the action got intense. When I first booted up the game with the graphics set to 1080p and the “High” preset, the menu screens were running at less than 20 frames per second, and performance in the game itself was only slightly better. Indie space shooter Galak-Z runs on Unity, and despite its relative simplicity compared to a game like Portal 2, I had much more trouble running it on integrated graphics at decent settings. Small graphics compromises guarantee 60 fps. Verdict: Wonderfully playable on HD Graphics 520.

I think locking the framerate to 30 fps could deliver a good gaming experience with these settings, but I prefer the trade-off of lower detail for a smooth 60 fps. In a test chamber, the fps fluctuated from around 30 fps to 50 fps. Still, this is a particularly demanding sequence of the game. It didn’t fare so well this time, with the framerate dipping down to about 27 fps and ranging as high as 50 fps. To see how far I could push Portal 2, I changed all the graphics settings to “High” with 2xMSAA and ran through the intro again. Without the Fraps overlay enabled, I’m not sure I would’ve even noticed the dip. This didn’t cause any sensation of lag or stuttering. To test a scene with a little more going on, I loaded the game’s introduction, which involves quite a bit of environmental destruction, and saw the framerate drop a couple times down to about 52 fps before immediately bouncing back up to 59-60 fps. With VSync triple buffering enabled, Portal 2 maintained a stable framerate of 59 fps almost the entire time I played it across a number of official and community-created test chambers.

Intel graphics integrated