4.1 fails to run on older laptop with integrated graphics

[Rotareneg]

This is just an observation, not a critique, or complaint: SB 4.157 does not work at all on my older ( i5-3230M, 8 gigs of ram, integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, definitely not a gaming system) laptop. It ran 4.0 just fine however, so I guess the minimum GPU requirement has gone up quite a bit.

 

The symptoms are the game closing unexpectedly while trying to load a scenario, and freezing when trying to load the mission or map editor.

 

Attached is a debug log from trying to load a tank range scenario. I suspect the following error is the relevant one, as a log taken when the mission editor freezes endlessly repeats this same error until you kill SB with the task manager.

 

[16:52:01,213] CGame ERROR: Failed CGame::UpdateAndRender, Render3DEnvironment, hr=0x8876086C

 

 

 

DebugLog.txt

[Sean]

Pro PE now uses video ram to a far greater extent than it used to.  Intel integrated graphics has no RAM of its own, it uses a chunk of your system RAM.  You may try allocating a bigger chunk of your system RAM to the integrated graphics card in the BIOS. 

[Ssnake]

I could get the benchmark scenario to run on the HD4000 chip in one of my notebooks with a late beta version (probably 4.148), but even then I couldn't complete it. After maybe 40 minutes serious render artifacts appeared and eventually I aborted the whole experiment.

 

So, there's nothing that changed which would inherently prevent Intel chips from running Steel Beasts, but the fact that the updated engine utilizes GPU functions a lot more means that the Intel integrated graphics are simply overtaxed.

[Rotareneg]

On that laptop the dedicated memory setting in the bios is apparently locked at 64 megs so that's a no-go, but seeing Ssnake's results along with how hard my desktop's GTX 760 is having to work to run it makes it pretty clear that a low-end integrated GPU is not going to cut it. As I said, it's not a gaming laptop so I'm not surprised or concerned.