Can you play games using Intel® HD Graphics 530 ?

In recent years Intel has come up with the graphics core inbuilt in its processors and Intel HD 530 is a recent example for that, which is coming with latest Intel 6^th generation skylake processors. Form a very amateur (& Intel) point of view this graphics core is capable of handling 4k display load and can support graphics memory up to 1.7 GB, pretty great huh!

Well I can say with no doubt that it a very power efficient processor, which revolutionist the notebooks and ultra-books these days in case of battery life and you might be able to see the 4k movies on it. I suggest that you should not push it behind 1080.

Bench marking 

Though you can expect a bearable frame rates at 1280x720 basic setting, but HD530 graphics card won't hold the fort even if you bump it to 1600x900.

I have used the Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0 to benchmark this Intel Core graphics and here are the results 

Resolution	Preset	Max FPS	Min FPS	Average FPS
1280x720	Basic	36	12.7	21.4
1600x900	Extreme	5.4	2.1	3.1

It was pretty clear that only a very low graphics intense game can be played on this graphics card that also on the basic setting.

To put things in context a mid range dedicated graphics card like NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4gb graphics card churned out these number on extreme HD setting.

Resolution	Preset	Max FPS	Min FPS	Average FPS
1920x1080	Extreme HD	63.5	21	34.7

Clearly even a highly graphics intensive game is playable at all the time.

I have seen HD 530 fail to render simple desktop animations properly (or smoothly) like the windows wait wheel (or some people call it wheel of death) at 1080 settings.

Your graphics card effect the usage of application like Photoshop and many movie editors, it does not matter whether you have i3, i5 or i7 processor (All the above bench marking is done on i7 6700 processor).

So Intel graphics cores are only usable where power consumption is a big issue, a dedicated graphics card take more that 50% power of your device, like laptops (ultra-books) or you want to save cost and know for sure that you are not going to use your desktop or laptop for any graphics intensive work other than playing 2D chess (I am pretty sure HD 530 will have issue rendering 3D chess).

Verdict 

So don’t go with the Intel claim that they have improved their graphics core a lot since the 4^th generation processors (HD 4600),  Fact is they still fails to deliver when it comes to gaming or graphics intensive work.