It turns out you can play Saints Row without a graphics card, as the sandbox crime caper will work on an iGPU. The recently released reboot joins a growing list of games that’ll run just fine without dedicated AMD or Nvidia pixel pushers, like No Man’s Sky and the gaming PC port of Spider-Man Remastered.
According to YouTuber RandomGaminginHD, Saints Row runs just fine without a graphics card, and you can even play at 1080p with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. The benchmark enthusiast also explores the world of Santo Iles using an Athlon 3000G and Intel Core i3 12300, all while maintaining a frame rate over 30fps.
Naturally, playing Saints Row using a CPU rather than a graphics card comes with caveats, as dialling back its settings to low is a must. Nevertheless, the fact you can get the sandbox adventure running at all without dedicated hardware is impressive, and it’s a testament to the game’s impressive optimisation.
We’d still recommend playing Saints Row using the best graphics card you can get hold of, as it’ll enable you to boost fps and prevent things from looking like a PS2 romp. While RandomGaminginHD’s experiement sounds silly it does have a practical purpose, as it helps provide reassurance that’ll work well on the Steam Deck and low-spec handheld gaming PC alternatives by Onexplayer and Ayaneo.
There’s something particularly amusing about exploring games that’ll run without a graphics card, especially since RTX 4000 and RDNA 3 are about to take the scene by storm. Most enthusiasts aim to build the best gaming PC possible, but perhaps we’ll see more players run games on upcycled gaming laptops and rickety rigs in the future, especially if GPUs continue to fetch a premium price.