Does Your PC Have Only an iGPU CPU, and no Separate Graphics Card? How Bad/Good Is Using Blender?

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Hi. So I know that it’s best to build a PC with both a decent CPU and a decent separate graphics card.

But I’m still stubbornly thinking of building a PC with only a really good CPU with an iGPU, and not getting a separate graphics card until later if I need it/when I can afford it.

So has anyone ever used a PC with only a CPU and no dGPU for Blender?
If so, did it lag while using it?
Or did it actually do better than expected?
How complex was the mesh or scene (# of verts? super detailed textures? lots of modifiers? etc?)

I’m more concerned about if it lags while modeling a mesh or posing a rig or playing animation in viewport, as opposed to render times.

P.S. I know there’s benchmarks for render times. But are there any… subjective “benchmarks” for using Blender as I described above?

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I can run blender on an old 3rd gen laptop with an Intel HD 4000. It’s slower than my Gen2 workstation that has an rx 470 gpu and xeon E5-2690 cpu’s. I am able to sculpt a model using dyntopo at 1M. But it’s laggy. So is the workstation, laggy but not as bad. When using voxels it’s much much faster. Your iGPU will work. you can render scenes but beware, if the scene is complex enough, it could run for days, if not years.

It has been said many times, that the cpu is more important than the gpu.

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Something that is very important for blender other than the cpu, is the amount of ram capacity.

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I testing out the recently released 2.91.2 blender. It’s much faster than the older blender in sculpt mode. You should not have too much problem sculpting on your iGPU. It will work temporary.

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Thanks. So does it still lag when sculpting with the iGPU CPU computer?
Also, what’s its CPU model? So I can look up its benchmark score?
Also, just curious, what’s the clock speed for the xeon CPU? Apparently, there’s more than one version of this CPU and their benchmark scores are quite different.

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Have we discussed in another thread right? Xeon are expensive and do not have the best single thread performance.
You will be able to run Blender on an intel iGPU, but performance with Eevee will not be good. It’s as if you were waiting for someone to tell you that intel iGPU is great and you won’t need anything else, but that would be like lying to you.
Will you be able to work with an intel iGPU? Most likely, yes. Will you need a good dedicated graphics card with as much vRAM as you can in the near future? Most likely, yes.
Buy the best intel CPU that you can in this list, if it is preferable from a not old family of intel CPUs:

Meanwhile you save money to buy the dedicated graphics card when you see that iGPU is not enough for you.

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I have a laptop with a graphics card - AMD Radeon ™ Vega 3 Graphics. I wish the performance of EEVEE with complex scenes and animation playback was better. So I avoid realtime EEVEE animation playback a lot of the time. And GPU rendering of the viewport (cycles) doesn’t work hardly ever.

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APUs (CPU+iGPU package) do not only have lower GPU performance but lower CPU as well.

CPU package which you put in a socket usually have limited die space. Consider traditional Intel or AMD CPU size - they do not grow in size as fast from gen to gen. Therefore if you want to put iGPU on the same die with CPU you will need to sacrifice preciouss die space for iGPU logic and cut some CPU logic. In simple terms, in terms of performnce APUs = 1/2CPU + 1/2GPU, not 1 CPU + 1/2 GPU.

If you are planning to buy decent GPU in the future consider good and fast CPU + low range GPU as stratup configuration. In that scenario you will need to upgrade GPU eventually, but your CPU will serve you much better and longer.

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Something to say about the future gpu. Most blender artists recommend nivida. Something about performance and compatibility. Are you using Windows?

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There isn’t a “really good” CPU with GPU core for desktop to begin with.
At best you can find some 8 core Intel CPU with GPU core, but that like lower mid end CPU for today.

If you want to get really good CPU and short on money for GPU your best bet will be getting used GPU card and pair it with AMD CPU. Even 6 year old mid end GPU going to dump iGPU into the ground and people might even be willing to give one out for free…

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i7-3540M at 3.00ghz that’s what the laptop uses.

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Just to clarify what I have said before. Buying a mid/low-range CPU and a mid/low-range GPU just because you can’t afford something better would be a bad choice. Buy now the best intel CPU with iGPU that you can buy. You think ahead, it must be a CPU that does not become obsolete soon. Then in a year or two you buy a good discrete graphics card.

Actually, that was the way I built my current PC about 10 years ago.

1 Like
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Thanks. I hadn’t thought of buying a cheap GPU with a good CPU. That would open up the option of buying other good CPUs that don’t have an iGPU.

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Would any of these CPUs still be high-end today?
i9-10900K
i9-10850K
i7-10700K
AMD Ryzen 7 4700G

I mean that doesn’t mean their iGPU are any good, but the CPUs seem fine afaik, at least in terms of single-thread performance.

I found these CPUs from the best single-thread-performance CPUs here:

And yeah, buying a cheap graphics card might allow me to get an AMD CPU, which seem to have more cores, and can still get good single-thread performance. It’ll probably all depend on what CPU I actually need, and money.