Will game run on latest intel iris xe graphics

Technical Support
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Hey there fellow users and staff!

I am aware of the issues D2 Resurrected has had with integrated graphics ever since it was released. However, recently i was able to play the D4 beta with the latest graphics driver for the intel iris xe series (31.0.101.4148) installed. This driver update included D4 beta support in the release notes which was awesome by intel! Only graphics issues there were rare texture lightning flickers that weren’t affecting the gameplay at all. I also tested the driver on the free edition of D3 and it runs the game without any issues. Given this i am highly optimistic that the driver update will also be able to handle D2 Resurrected without big hiccups. However, since i want to be sure before purchasing the game i decided to ask here if that is indeed the case? Any thoughts from players with integrated intel iris xe graphics that run the game or perhaps a staff member that is familiar is more than welcome!

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Hard to say Intel Iris Xe ranges from not bad to quite poor, depending wether it’sa mobile or desktop, and also on CPU model the i5 i7 i9 H series have much stronger integrated chips than the U series. so intel Iris is a DX12 card which is the actual minimum requirement for the game, however only the top highest end CPUs have integrated GPU chip that can perform decently on low-ish settings. the lower end cpus won’t cut it performance wise. So check Your exact CPU model consult android app GPU-L if the Floating Point 32 ( single precision efficiency) is aroud 500 GT/s or more and texture and pixel fill rate are above 100 giga pixels/txels non boost you should be good to go. however if theese numbers are far below, then you should look for better hardware if you would like to play D2R.

D4 has actually lower system requiremets than D2R since D4 is a game written from ground up and properly optimized, and D2R is a 20 year old game hacked to use modern graphics, so by definition this game will require more calculating power than D4.

I actually managed to run the game on UHD 615 on intel’s m3 8100Y cpu, however run is the only thing it could do, as it’s definetly not playable. so to shuffle stuff between chars, why not, but to play D2R on it no way…

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Hey Leslaw, thank you for replying!

I downloaded the android app to check my gpu performance specs and it seems to fall a bit short of the recommended in your post. I am using the mobile Intel Iris Xe Graphics (96EU) with the i7-1165G7 processor. While single-precision is around 2k giga floating operations/second the pixel and texture fill rate are, respectively, 31.2 GP/s and 62.4 GT/s. Not sure if i have the option to boost these figures, but it looks questionable what will happen once i try to run the game.

I always have the option to wait for another discount of the game and buy it then and use the legacy graphics if all else fails. Of course, i can think of buying/improving my hardware as well, but for now i’m sticking with my “professional” laptop :laughing:.

In any case this was very useful information to me so thank you for sharing it!

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don’t panic theese don’t look that bad…
I mean the theoretical efficiency is quite good, and texture/pixel fill rate may fall short but my figures were estimats based on my experience, however they are not 100% precise, still they are just estimates. on muh UHD 615 on m3-8100Y also listed on this mobile app ( 8th gen HD Graphics i belive) has:
2,4 GP/s
3,6 GT/s
FP32 115,2 Gflops
and as i said this is on the edge of playing on the lowest specs.

so You see I’m actually quite confident Your device can handle the game quite nice, definetly on low settings, and possibly even higher. you just need most recent drivers.

Intel enabled dx12 features in their drivers in oct 2022, so a matching driver released later than that is surely going to be sufficient for You.

DX12 is a mandatory requirement for the game, hence why most old hardware is not working as GTX 660 is the first Nvidia GPU to be dx12 capable, older chips don’t support it, and that is the main problem.

Intel cards are unsupported in general becausse initially they didn’t supported dx12 ( i mean feature level did but not in the driver) that came later (as i said oct 2022) far later than the game initially launched.
the thing is intel integrated gpus do work, however the main problem for most of them is efficiency. most of them are just meh, yours on the other hand seemes to be one of the stronger representatives in intel’s portfolio, still far behind the competition, however it’s not that bad. the only problem might be pixel fill rate. The only problem you may face is that after the level loads, the quality textures and hi res pixels may load with a delay, so visuals may look barebones for first few seconds.

At least this is the case on my desktop with a different setup, but it’s hard to estimate how much efficiency i get off my graphic card sincie it’s heavily bottlenecked by my PCI-E port. My Motherboard is old and so is the PCI-E x16 revision. modern ones use v5.0 . I use v1.0A. the golden standard was up until recently v3.0, and v1.0A is the relict of a past, with extremely limited throughput.

Just remember, if you want to play the game, after starting it, you should quickly go to options and tone down the initial settings, as system components may get quite hot literally within minutes of launching the game. i have no idea how well heatsinked are your onboard components, and likely you wouldn’t want to cause system damage due to overheating, so try to tone down graphics quailty to minimum, go play and check the laptop with your hand… if you’ll burn yur hand, you’ll know you need to tone down the graphics even more. if the temperature is ok you may try to up the graphics quality a bit and go test agin. do the testing until you fine tune the graphics/heating settings puzzle.

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Thank you Leslaw! I went ahead to mark your response as a solution since you put forward enough information for me to consider buying the game and try it out with this setup. The graphic driver i use is up to date, it was the version that included the D4 beta support in intel’s release notes on March 16 - 31.0.101.4148. I will come back to this topic to share feedback once i’ve ran the game, this info can benefit others with similar hardware.

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heh… just bare in mid that intel cards are not officially supported by blizz, so if something doesn’t work You’re on your own, and they won’t help You. seems. the will it work is a hit or miss, as blizz has some drivers working and others blacklisted, and they seem to add new entries to the blacklist. who knows maybe they haven’t blacklisted my driver, since i have, an untypical version with a small hotfix, that was specifically made for my cpu version only… it differs only by one digit in the version number. anyways You’ve probably seent he specs of my UHD615 and do know it’s not exactly playable ( I mean it could launch the game, but i wouldn’t call it playable), Yor specs on the other hand could run the game, but i don’t know if blizz didn’t blacklist your driver.

The guy with UHD 620 in a similar thread for example is outta luck since his driver was blacklisted and it’s a previus gen GPU ( my is amber lake his is kaby lake) si it’s not exactly that it’s better than it’ll definetly run… it’s a hit or miss. anyways if you purchase the game, it’s not like it will go away, if you can’t run it now, you may perhaps upgrade Your hardware in the future, and be able to play D2R That You’ve already purchased.

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My thoughts exactly. I did purchase the game today along with D3 since i enjoyed the starter edition of D3 (don’t know why i waited for more than 10 years to do that, but oh well). Both games are on discount since today and it was only 20 EUR for both so i gladly chipped in. I read most of the topics in the forum relating to intel iris xe series so i know not to expect support from Blizzard and that it’s more or less luck if the game runs or not. Downloading as we speak, so i will share the outcome regardless. I think even if the newer graphics fail on all troubleshooting steps i can still revert back to the legacy ones for the time being too. Fingers crossed :crossed_fingers:!

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ok did a re-check on my tablet today. I finally got Intels driver assistant working and it downloaded updated drivers from 5 april 2023.
the game is still able to launch. on minimal specs it reaches around 15-20 fps in town, and in legacy mode it reaches 30 fps, there is an overheating problem after few minutes, in Modrn view the screen turns black (only hud is visible), however everything runs fine when i switch to legacy mode.
If Yor laptop has active cooling and a good heatsink You should be fine.

anyways I’ll monitor the news from you, i may also assist with other troubleshooting regarding D2R, as i sort of ate my own teeth on it so to speak.

oh yeah do notice me on the estimated download time or at least the speed you are downloading at, and aproximate remaining download…

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And here is the update from me - game is running without any issues so far! Only played a bit through Act 1, but everything works, game launches, no lag, new graphics work on default settings even. I ran into the same texture problem reported here and it got solved by the suggestion to set the transparency quality to ultra-high. Something to do with the latest iris xe drivers. Other than that, after launch there are a few seconds of black screen before the main menu appears. Not sure what is the cause, but probably some heavy initial loading. So you were right - Intel Iris Xe Graphics 96 EU series with updated drivers can handle the game!

Sorry about that, i think download took 30-40 minutes, enough to squeeze in an episode of Gray’s Anatomy while waiting. Then i was caught up playing before going back to the thread to report on the outcome. So hopefully our conversation here will help other people with intel’s integrated gpus who want to give it a go!

PS Massive thanks once again for testing and helping out!

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At Your service…

I’m glad my ramblings and buming around did help someone, have a good time playing.

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Playing D2R on an Intel i5-1235U device with Iris Xe graphic. It’s doing fine at lowest quality settings and 1280x720 resolution (55-60 fps). However, Travincal and Icy/Shenk is stuttering hard.
D2R is strange anyway. Can play games like WoW-Dragonflight or D3 at high/max graphics settings without any issues (even have to limit the fps to keep my cooling fan quiet) but D2R somehow fails.

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Hey You have a different version of Intel Iris Xe. the guy before you has a more efficient one with 96 execution units, on the other hand Yours has 80.

Simply put His card is on the boarder of smooth play, and you have a less powerful GPU, do the equation yourself.

Be glad that when reaching Icy caves/Shenk Your PC doesn’t crash or cut the power off, as I’ve already read situations like this happen due to too weak components beeing installed in a PC.
Anyways those are really graphically demanding areas of the game, and simply put your gpu simply doesn’t cut where the previous’s guy GPU was bearly on the edge of smoothness. His card was already lacking in the area where your card simply can’t handle the stress. i’m talking ofcourse of pixel and texture fill rate, yours is signifcantly worse ( well don’t expect wonders on a lowest end CPU like the U series). you may try windowed mode, seting 50% scaling or try lowering all the other graphical quality settings, But i’m afraid it won’t help much on Shenk’s demise.

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I’m not expecting anything much since this is not a gaming Laptop. I like it for it’s speed in loading times. D2R launches within a few seconds (connecting to battle.net is the bottleneck now). The loading screen when moving from Act1-4 to Act5 Icy WP lasts for about 3 seconds with packed game data, anything else almost instant. On my previous Laptop it took minimum 8 seconds and sometimes the game even crashed.
Programming software like TIA Portal is super fast now.

My System uses dual channel RAM 2x8GB (one dedicated for graphics when needed). The native resolution of my Laptop is 2560x1440 which is too much for any application on this rather small screen. Scaling down to 1280x720 (4-pixel-square = 1 pixel) looks better and things do not get out of shape like when scaling down from regular 1920x1080 laptop resolution, the reason why I decided to buy this one.

D2R could run much smoother with some fixes in said areas. Take the Druids’s level 1 summonskill “Poison Creeper” for example. I promise you no matter what gaming supercomputer you use, the game begins to stutter whenever that pet unleashes it’s poison effect. Any FPS drops in this game are more of a game-issue, not a gpu-issue. As I already said, other games with also high or even higher graphics (also games that I did not mention in my previous post) run smooth and D2R also does in most areas. For Shenk/Travincal I’m using dynamic resolution scaling. Whenever my fps drops below 50, the resolution gets lower.
At least they could implement an option to lower/turn off reflection and shadow effects for very small, not recognizable thinks like little stones on the ground.

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