How Useful Is an iGPU?
For power users and gamers, one of the most important components for their build is their GPU. The main reason is that a lot of the current workloads can be GPU accelerated or processed by the GPU which leads to a significant decrease in time spent waiting.
Some CPUs however also come with an integrated GPU (iGPU) which is quite slow by comparison and in a lot of cases just gets disabled from the BIOS. Technically speaking, however, the iGPU could still be used for extra computational power or other tasks and this is what we will look at today.
iGPU – Workloads
While not necessarily capable by itself the iGPU that comes on your CPU could still be used to offload some of the stress from your main GPU while you edit or encode video on your PC. Having the iGPU enabled allows software like Premiere Pro to use it (Quick Sync for Intel) as an extra resource, cut down waiting times, and increase responsiveness.
You also get extra codec compatibility from having the iGPU being used in these kinds of editing software so overall a net benefit with better performance and more flexibility. This pattern and implementation is becoming more common where productivity software allows you to use your iGPU paired with your discrete GPU to gain better performance and features.
iGPU – Streaming
The same capabilities are available if you want to stream since you can then offload the entire encoding process to the iGPU and leave the CPU + GPU to work on the game. While using something like NVENC for an NVIDIA GPU results in amazing performance, having the encoding happen on a different device altogether leads to the best possible outcome.
If you stream and can offload the stream encoding to your iGPU you should run some tests and see how good the stream looks and what does your performance in game look like.
iGPU – Maintenance
The most basic advantage a system that has an iGPU has is when the discrete GPU malfunctions and you need a display to see what is going on with your system. On a CPU with no iGPU you have no other option but to source a different GPU, while if your CPU does have an integrated GPU you can display to a monitor with that.
While this only matters when your PC is malfunctioning it is still a nice safety net to have in case something does go wrong across the board.
TL;DR
While not necessarily advantageous as a direct competitor to a full GPU, an iGPU does have its moments where it can work as a complementary computational source to improve the responsiveness and processing power of your system.