So intel sent me a new laptop, because they are wonderful nice people, and one of the reasons for this is to get game developers to use their amazing performance tools, and to see how modern games run on the very latest intel hardware. The laptop in question runs GTB very very well, and the graphics card is apparently an intel HD Graphics 4000 . I have to say, that if I plugged a mouse in, I could probably quite happily use it as a main gaming PC, which is a vast surprise to me.
Anyway, the main thing that impresses me is this intel graphcis performance analyzer stuff. You run a small program on the target PC (the laptop) and then run the analyzer stuff on another PC, connecting trivially by IP address. You run a game, and then you can connect to it on the second PC and view dozens of real time graphs on all sorts of crazy stats as you play. It’s pretty impressive stuff. AQTime can do this after-the-event, and it’s great for really working out exact lines of code that need optimizing, but this is a great way to get insight into the GPU, rather than the CPU.
Clickable full size screenshot below:
If you have a PC with an intel graphics chip, give it a go. Their performance analyzer stuff seems to be free, which is also awesome. I think for the first time in ages, intel video cards may well start to become serious rivals to ATI/Nvidia. Also the contrast between nvidias attitude to indie game developers (totally ignore me, even when reporting a bug), and intels is night and day.
Heres a video showing some of the stuff: