   How common are Intel GFX Cards?
  I've pretty much decided on the C4 engine for my project. It isn't Torque, its cheaper than Unity Pro and spiffier than Unity Basic, and I'll get free updates and use of it for life. All that said, it does not support Intel graphics cards. I'd need to stick to height map terrain and basic stencil shadows to get it to work, and the hard shadows.. ugh. Anyway... How common is this line of cards that I'm debating excluding from my audience? Would going with C4 and cutting off Intel cards be shooting myself in the foot?p.s. I had no idea where to post this. Mods, please move the thread as appropriate.   
Quote:Original post by JasRonqI've pretty much decided on the C4 engine for my project. It isn't Torque, its cheaper than Unity Pro and spiffier than Unity Basic, and I'll get free updates and use of it for life. All that said, it does not support Intel graphics cards. I'd need to stick to height map terrain and basic stencil shadows to get it to work, and the hard shadows.. ugh. Anyway... How common is this line of cards that I'm debating excluding from my audience? Would going with C4 and cutting off Intel cards be shooting myself in the foot?A better first question would be: what is your intended audience?If your target market is hardcore gamers, then pretty much none of them are using intel-integrated (at least not on their gaming machine).If you want to include casual gamers, laptop users, or the lunchtime-gamer market, then intel-integrated outnumber all other cards by several orders of magnitude.; Yea, a lot of basic laptops have intel gfx, which really only supports graphics that is not incorporating any pixel shaders or anything.  Also some PC manufacturers use intel gfx chipsets for machines that aren't at all geared toward gaming. But anybody who has a computer for playing games is 97% likely to be running anything above intel..   ;Quote:Original post by radioteethYea, a lot of basic laptops have intel gfx, which really only supports graphics that is not incorporating any pixel shaders or anything.Later Intel chipsets are quite capable - my (elderly) X3100 mobile can push half a million triangles with shader-based per-pixel lighting and multi-texturing.Quote:Also some PC manufacturers use intel gfx chipsets for machines that aren't at all geared toward gaming.Any PC you buy off the shelf in a department store will have an integrated graphics chipset - that accounts for the vast majority of computers out there.Quote:But anybody who has a computer for playing games is 97% likely to be running anything above intel..Target audience, target audience. Indies can't always afford to alienate lower-spec computers in the way that the big players such as ID and Crytek can [wink]   ;Its either the Intel integrated chip is lacking some typical features of the better graphics units  (the chip costs something like $7 and uses main memory) though the HAL (software simulation mode) usually allows the various features to still run just very slowly.  Maybe it requires the higher level shader scripts...ORits performance running (even without resorting to the HAL) on the integrated intel chip is so bad that a game using that package would be too miserable to be worth trying (1/2 frame per second...)   