I recently purchase a HP Pavilion Core i3. It has one of those intel integrated graphic card with memory 1792MB. Before I purchase Pillars of Eternity, what are my chances the games will work?

The minimum recommended Nvidia card is the 9600 GT. I am not very familiar with integrated cards but my initial guess would be probably not.

Either you need to check the exact model of HP Pavilion (e.g. HP Pavilion G6 has an Intel HD Graphics 3000) or go to Control Panel/Device Manager and look at what is shown under the Display Adapters section.

 

If you have an Intel graphics chipset, then you may be able to run PoE but not very well (or most other games for that matter since Intel produce the least capable graphics chips). Your best bet would be older games like PoE's spiritual successor Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 - these also benefit from dozens of high quality mods, most notably the Baldur's Gate Trilogy mod which combines both games into one epic quest using the BG2 engine.

Why not just spend $100 or so and get a quality value video card?

 

You should be able to find a 2GB Radeon HD 6970 for just under $100. It's not the best, but it's a lot better than integrated, and it should do what you want without all the bells & whistles added in to newer games. I assume that card should run PoE without any real problems.

Because he has a laptop, that's why.

also, just tossing this into here because it seems relevant...

I'm running this on a gtx 760, and the bottleneck has never been on the card, even running in forced antialiasing.

oddly, the bottleneck is at the cpu, which this game runs very hot (often over 93C).  I'm running I7 at 3.7ghz, which is more than enough to run any unity game ever made.

there's something wonky with how the game is overutilizing the cpu.

just saying, they are overestimating the miminum specs for what GPU this can run on, but that might not be why a lot of people have trouble running it; especially on a laptop say.

 

...oddly, the bottleneck is at the cpu, which this game runs very hot (often over 93C)...

As an aside, that high a temperature should merit an examination of your setup (either dialling back the overclock or improving the CPU cooling). If PoE can cause those termperatures, then plenty of other applications can too.

 

A good (and free) CPU stress tester for this is Prime95 (use the "stress test" option) which can also double as a memory test. For monitoring temperatures, CoreTemp (32-bit version or 64-bit version - these are direct adware-free download links) is a good choice - just avoid the main download which includes InstallQ adware.

Because he has a laptop, that's why.

That would be a good reason.

 

As an aside, that high a temperature should merit an examination of your setup (either dialling back the overclock or improving the CPU cooling). If PoE can cause those termperatures, then plenty of other applications can too.

naw.

 

plenty of other applications simply... don't.

 

in fact, of the few applications that do, almost all of them are based on the Unity engine.

 

not kidding.

 

 

 

For monitoring temperatures, CoreTemp (32-bit version or 64-bit version - these are direct adware-free download links) is a good choice - just avoid the main download which includes InstallQ adware.

I already use openhardwaremonitor (which is better).

 

 

Edited April 11, 201510 yr by Ichthyic

...plenty of other applications simply... don't.

 

Not tried Prime95 then? Go on, I dare you.

 

*heads off to call the fire service to report an impending explosion at Ichthyic's address*

I already use openhardwaremonitor (which is better).

Looks pretty, but nothing that requires .NET bloatware gets my vote. And it doesn't seem to offer graphs (CoreTemp does via a plugin).