SkarKrow said:
Most people who care won't be playing games on intelgrated graphics though, they'll seek out a dedicated chip or use a card in their desktop.
If you must use integrated graphics systems why would you use intel and not AMD? The performance is day and night, the recent APU's give really solid performance for the budget...
All of the above. Seriously, nobody interested in gaming (or system building) is going to fork out the beans for an i7-3770K processor and then say "you know what, the integrated HD4000 graphics are fine".
AMD's APUs have the low end of the market locked up right now. The builtin graphics on even a relatively lowly A4 mean that they totally whomp Intel up to about the mid-i3. As soon as you get past that though, the raw CPU power of the Intels takes over; and Intel are fine with lesser integrated performance because they know that virtually nobody will use it.
All PC builders learn very early that a machine is only as fast as its weakest component. Historically that always meant the hard drive (Windows 7 Experience Index 5.9 GO GO GO), but SSDs have come down in price enough now for that not to be the issue. Now everything else is fair game, and that means the graphics are in the mix. Integrated is fine for home theater and other mini PCs where space for additional cards and cooling is at a premium. Want to do anything worthwhile? You need dedicated graphics. It's hardly Intel's fault that they've recognised this and aimed at the CPU Power end of the market rather than the "just enough graphics to play Angry Birds" end.
All that said, of course, if reining back the graphics for so long has enabled the indies to get on with doing their thing and reduce the number of games that emphasise graphics over, you know, game, then Intel can keep on reining.
