Do Gamers Need A Graphics Card? iGPU Performance Explored

The DIY PC market is in a tough spot. If we disregard older, previous-gen graphics cards for a moment, the only company currently selling anything approaching a modern entry-level GPU is Intel, and those cards are nearly impossible to find for anything approaching MSRP. Quality motherboards for under $100 barely exist, and those that do are so bare-bones you probably don't want them. Thankfully, memory's cheap, and so are SSDs, but if you want more than six big CPU cores you'd better be prepared to drop another $300—or buy last-gen chips. Or even last-last-last-gen, as the case may be. It's enough to really frustrate an enthusiast.

People trust me as someone who's knowledgeable about components and custom PCs. I've built hundreds of gaming machines in the last 25 years, all carefully parted out and put together depending on the person's budget. But now, if your budget isn't creeping close to four digits, it's hard to even recommend anything worth buying. Some of this can be blamed on inflation, some of it can be attributed to tariffs, and some of it is simply a matter of fiscal realities for component creators in a world willing to spend nearly unlimited dollars on datacenter and AI hardware.


None of that matters to end users, though. When you want a PC to play some games on, you need a system that will run the games you want at the price you can afford. The proportion of people on this earth who can afford to buy a complete system including a $700 graphics card is vanishingly slim, though, and that's to say nothing of the more egregiously-priced equipment out there. PC gaming used to be a relatively cheap hobby.

Well, maybe it still is. If you're willing to accept some compromises, you might be able to get away with something real cheap. How cheap? How does $370 USD sound?

Stretching The Definition Of 'Gaming PC'

By any reasonable, rational metric, this is not a "gaming PC." No one being honest would call this a gaming PC. You don't have to have a "gaming PC" to play games on your PC anymore, though. It used to be the case that integrated graphics were barely sufficient for playing videos, much less video games. But things have changed.

The truth is, all you really need is the right combination of components to enable stable frame rates, even if you have to run the games in low resolutions and on low settings. Gaming in low resolution isn't the end of the world; the game content doesn't change. So, enter this build, which we put together for under $400 last year.


It's not fancy. The Apex DM-387 steel chassis is an absolute brick considering how small it is, and we wouldn't trust the power supply as far as we can throw it. The MSI MAG A520M Vector WiFi, despite the fancy name, is one of the most barebones Socket AM4 motherboards that exists. Still, it works; you get an M.2 socket for the Samsung SSD 970 EVO, and you get an AM4 socket for the Ryzen 5 5600G APU and its integrated Vega 7 graphics.

This chip is codenamed "Cezanne" and it was refreshed as "Barcelo", which is still being sold today in the form of the Ryzen 3 7330U, Ryzen 5 7530U, and Ryzen 7 7730U. Cezanne features eight Zen 3 CPU cores and eight Vega-based graphics compute units, however, our little Ryzen 5 5600G only has six CPU cores and seven of its GPU compute units enabled. Vega is quite long in the tooth at this point too, with the initial Radeon Vega products having launched way back in 2017. It still gets the job done, though, as you'll see.


The DM-387 chassis has absolutely no accommodations for cable management, so excuse us for that. Also, the system as pictured has a Seagate hard drive in it; that wasn't present when we were testing the system and isn't factored into the cost of the machine. We're using the Ryzen APU's boxed Wraith Stealth CPU cooler because it's more than sufficient, even when overclocked. We'll talk about overclocking a bit more later though, because our MSI A520M motherboard doesn't support it.

All told, this system is a fair bit more powerful than the Steam Deck in terms of CPU horsepower (with six Zen 3 cores to the Steam Deck's four Zen 2 cores) and in terms of memory capacity, where it doubles the Deck's 16GB. The biggest difference, though, is that the Steam Deck has a relatively-modern RDNA 2 GPU and fast DDR5 memory feeding it. As a result, games actually run worse for the most part on this machine than on a Steam Deck.

So, What Can You Really Play On The Ryzen 5 5600G?

The Cezanne die includes eight compute units constructed using the same architecture as the Radeon Vega series of graphics cards. Our Ryzen 5 5600G, being a slightly cut-down model, retains seven of those eight, giving it a grand total of 448 DirectX 12 shaders, 28 texture mapping units, and just 8 render output units. For the sake of comparison, the venerable Radeon 9700 Pro, released in mid-2002, also had 8 ROPs. The PlayStation 2 had 16.

That's not a big GPU, and it's going to be the bottleneck most of the time when gaming, even though it has to share a DDR4 memory bus with six Zen 3 CPU cores. You can shift the bottleneck over to the memory bus by playing games in native 1080p or higher resolutions, but most of the more intense 3D games in our list aren't going to perform well in 1080p no matter what the bottleneck is. "What list," you might ask? Why, this one:


Here's the first half of game test results. Sure, there's some unsurprising stuff in here; it's not impressive that the Ryzen 5 5600G doesn't struggle with Holocure or Champion Shift. It IS pretty damn impressive that you can play Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Hogwarts Legacy, though.


In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, "play" is a bit of a stretch. We did find some settings that will get you to around 30 FPS in combat—a bit higher while walking around—and it's playable, but not a great experience. If you had a motherboard that allowed overclocking, you could definitely smooth this one out. Not noted in the list is that even at 720p output, we're also using FSR upscaling. Yeah, it's rough.


Elden Ring is considerably less demanding and given that it was designed to run at around 30 FPS on consoles (and isn't an FPS game with fast action), it feels much better at 30 FPS. Actually, the frame rate will rise above 30 anytime you're in an enclosed area, like the legacy dungeons, but it does struggle a little out in the wide open. Still, it never drops too much below 30 FPS at these settings; it's very playable this way.


Hogwarts Legacy we didn't expect to work at all. But it does -- More or less. You have to use a great degree of FSR2 scaling, which doesn't look great at lower frame rates, but the performance is remarkably stable at around 30 FPS and reasonably playable. We would call this one a better experience than Cyberpunk, although it's still a little marginal. It works, though, and you could probably tweak the settings to improve the visuals without losing much performance thanks to the hard GPU horsepower bottleneck.


Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is basically a ReShade preset on top of the original Xbox 360-era game, so it should come as no surprise that it runs beautifully on this machine. This is one of the best showcases for a system like this, because it still looks great while running very smoothly at high settings.

A couple of titles on our list simply did not work on the Ryzen 5 5600G, and not for performance reasons. Both Grand Theft Auto V's new Expanded & Enhanced version as well as F1 24 completely refused to launch due to the newest driver for this machine being the relatively old 24.9.1 from last September. We were able to get GTA V Enhanced working in Linux—at least, the single-player element; online play barfs due to no anti-cheat support—and it's playable enough, but it seems like in Windows it's a no-go.


Demon's Souls was one of a handful of PlayStation 3 games that we tested on the Ryzen 5 5600G. Generally speaking, the overwhelming majority of PS3 games that work well on RPCS3 are going to work fine on this chip. Demon's Souls in particular runs very smoothly, even with a 60 FPS patch, and Heavenly Sword is great too. Hard Corps Uprising also runs great, although that's less remarkable because of its nature as a relatively simple 2.5D action title. It still kicks ass, though; if you missed out on this one, fire it up and give it a try.


Naturally, Gamecube and Wii emulation also works well. Actually, every single game we tested on Dolphin Emulator worked flawlessly. In part, that's a testament to the quality of Dolphin, but it's also a high mark for the potency of the Ryzen 5 5600G. Emulation is much more about CPU performance than GPU, and that means that a system like this can often outperform the Steam Deck in demanding emulator tests.


Finally, we wanted to point out Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Final Fantasy XIV was a weirdly weak spot for Radeon GPUs for a long time, and that seems to have been straightened out in the era of RDNA 3, but unfortunately, those driver fixes never came to Vega. This game struggles more than we would expect, but it is possible to get smooth performance if you lower the resolution, or enable dynamic FSR.


In the second half of our game testing, you'll find a few more good-performance 'givens', a few more surprising success stories in super-high-end titles, and a few more failures. We talked about emulation just above; Metroid Prime is glorious in 2x Native resolution, while Red Dead Redemption on RPCS3 is basically unplayable—uniquely, for CPU reasons, not GPU.


What about Switch emulation? Switch emulation is hit or miss, but depending on the title, you can achieve pretty solid performance. I got The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the most demanding Switch titles, running at a very consistent 30 FPS using Yuzu emulator—something that requires game mods on the Steam Deck.


Despite the lack of any next-generation rendering features, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a pretty heavy game, even in 2025. Even with the settings bottomed out in 720p, it's just not happening on the Vega 7. It's a GPU performance problem; the GPU is slammed at 100% load, even when you overclock the memory. There's just not enough GPU grunt here to render this cowboy action title with good performance.


Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is an incredible-looking game on fast hardware, with stunning setpieces and hundreds of units on screen at once. On a Ryzen 5 5600G's integrated Vega 7, it's drastically uglier. You can get it working, though, and it's fully playable. Not a great experience, but if you have to play Space Marine 2 and this is the hardware you've got, it'll work.


Don't be fooled by its mobile roots. Zenless Zone Zero is a full 3D action game with fast-paced battles and surprisingly deep mechanics. It works great on the Ryzen 5 5600G and stands as a showpiece for this kind of system. It would be easy to dismiss this result due to the game's presence on mobile, but the PC client features high-resolution textures and more detailed environments compared to the mobile version, so this is quite good.


Indie FPS Severed Steel is an Unreal Engine 4-based movement shooter where you have to be wall-running, diving, or sliding at basically every moment, because if you're not, you're toast. It's an incredibly difficult game and I am not good at it, but its low-detail presentation works just fine in 720p and it both looks and runs great.


In Sifu, you play the child of a martial arts master. Your father is murdered in cold blood and you must seek revenge decades later. This is another Unreal Engine 4 title and the Vega driver seems very well-tuned for Epic's engine. Sifu looks gorgeous and runs flawlessly on high settings with just a touch of resolution scaling to smooth things out. Another showpiece for the system.


The sequel to breakout indie hit Synthetik: Legion Rising, Synthetik 2 eschews the awkward 2D presentation of the original game for a full 3D render in the latest Unity engine. It looks gorgeous with the settings cranked up, but it doesn't look too bad at Medium, either. In native 1080p, with Medium settings, you'll get around 45 FPS, which is playable in this title, if not optimal. Synthetik 2 has FSR2 upscaling enabled by default; we actually recommend disabling it because the temporal sampling makes the game blurry and ugly in motion.


Teardown is an unbelievably optimized game considering that it uses true ray-traced global illumination for its lighting. That's right: ray-tracing, on integrated Vega graphics! Teardown doesn't use hardware RT acceleration, but instead is able to do its ray-racing calculations in GPU shaders thanks to the low-detail voxel structure of the game world. It looks fantastic, and the update adding DirectX 12 support with multi-core processing radically improved the performance of the game such that it runs smoothly even on our Vega 7.


Lastly, we wanted to give a shout-out to all the lightweight indie games that run just fine on the Ryzen 5 5600G. Despite what we wrote in the chart above, multiplayer roguelike brawler Lost Castle 2 does actually have a lot of 3D elements, but it runs flawlessly in 1080p on the 5600G. Likewise for many other titles in the list, like Neon White, Subverse, Night in the Woods, and HoloCure, which we mentioned earlier. Even without dipping into emulation, there are thousands of fun games that you can play with no compromises on a system like this.

This Little PC Seems Great, I Want One!

A Hypothetical Cezanne Build You Can Put Together Today:

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT 4.6 GHz 6-Core Zen 3 CPU: $144 at Amazon
• Gigabyte B550M-DS3H-AC Micro-ATX AM4 Motherboard: $99.99 at Amazon
• Klevv Bolt X 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory: $49.99 at Amazon
• Teamgroup MP33 512GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD: $36.99 at Amazon
• Rosewill FBM-X2-400-HELIX MicroATX Case w/400 PSU: $59.99 at Amazon

TOTAL PRICE: $390 (plus tax and shipping)

This build is about $20 more expensive, but it has a number of significant upgrades over the original build. That 400W Rosewill power supply is less likely to explode than the no-name unit in the Apex case, and the Ryzen 5 5600GT offers a bump in CPU clock rates over the Ryzen 5 5600G. Most notably, the Gigabyte B550M-DS3H-AC has an extra M.2 socket, and it's a B550 board, meaning you can overclock.

One of the major weaknesses of the A520 chipset that I used in my build is that you cannot overclock the processor. You can enable AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive, which is a form of overclocking, but that only applies to the six Zen 3 CPUs, and those are very rarely your bottleneck in games on this machine. A B550 board would let you overclock the GPU from its stock 1.7 GHz.

As a test, I put my Ryzen 5 5600G into an X570 board, and I was able to take the little Vega 7 to 2.4 GHz—a 41% uplift in clock rate that translates directly to between 15 and 40% better performance in games. Scaling isn't linear due to memory bandwidth bottlenecks, but you could overclock that, too; we were able to achieve a memory transfer rate of 4200 MT/s on the X570 board.


These two overclocks (GPU and RAM) are truly a make-or-break difference for a few of the games in our test suite; in particular, Cyberpunk 2077 becomes considerably more playable, and we were able to enjoy much more consistent frame rates in Armored Core VI and Palworld. Of course, we also had crashes in Warframe and Hogwarts Legacy where we didn't before, so some additional tuning would definitely be required.

A Much Better Build Option For Integrated GPU Gaming In 2025:

• AMD Ryzen 5 8600G 4.3GHz 6-Core Socket AM5 CPU: $186 at Amazon
• ASRock B650M PG Lightning WiFi Micro-ATX Motherboard: $119.99 at Amazon
• Klevv BOLT V 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6400 CL32 RAM: $91.99 at Amazon
• Teamgroup T-Force G50 1TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD: $57.99 at Amazon
• Rosewill FBM-X2-400-HELIX MicroATX Case w/400 PSU: $59.99 at Amazon

TOTAL PRICE: $516 (plus tax and shipping)

Of course, there's a comparison to be made here against the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, both of which are available for similar money. In compatible games, they'll give you a broadly superior gaming experience, but that's just the rub: "compatible games." With a console, you're locked into their ecosystem, while a gaming PC—especially a DIY one like this—gives you far more flexibility. Odds are, you already have a Steam library. Even if you don't, the sheer range of available titles, mods, emulators, storefronts, and input devices makes a PC way more versatile.

All told, this Socket AM5 build is more expensive, but what you get is well worth it. You could even slap a little GPU into this box and have a real Pro-console-class gaming experience. It will also serve great as an Office, Photoshop, home theater, or really whatever kind of machine you want, as long as you're realistic about the performance. What was the whole point of this exercise, again?

In The End, It's All About Having Fun

Part of the reason computer parts keep getting more expensive is because making them is getting more complex and the chips themselves are coming with incomprehensible amounts of computational capability. Intel's Panther Lake processors are going to have a tiled area even larger than that of Lunar Lake's 220 mm² despite that they're manufactured on a process with a nominal 1.8nm feature size, and Lunar Lake already eclipses this little 5600G in performance.

Maybe it's time to realize that scaling performance ever onward and upward has put us well past a threshold of 'good enough.' We've got people online acting like you ain't really "gaming" unless it's done at 4K with Ultra settings and triple-digit FPS, while quietly ignoring that half the world is still rocking 1080p monitors and a dream.

In 2007, I played Crysis on an old dual-core with DDR1 memory and a Radeon card that was already mediocre when it launched almost two years earlier. The system was loud enough to drown out the dialogue, and just barely fast enough to get me through the jungle levels. I made it work, though. Today, you can boot up Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077 on the integrated graphics of a sub-$150 CPU and actually have a good time, if you're willing to turn down the settings—and your ego.

But that's the problem, isn't it? Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking "can I play this?" and started asking "am I playing it correctly?" like there's some council of gods judging you for using Medium settings. There isn't. There's just you, a screen, and whether or not you're having fun. After all, that's what it's all about in the end, isn't it? Get out there, turn down your settings, and have some dang ol' fun.