I spent the first few years of Warframe playing on an Intel IGP in the evenings (Intel HD 5000) and have a few notes if you actually want to live the potato life:
- use a lower resolution / smaller window size (2x res = 4x pixels, and you pay by the pixel)
- you don't have to turn off color correction (it's very cheap and the game looks better with it enabled IMO), Dynamic Lighting or Character Shadows are similar -- I left them enabled on my 2013 laptop -- disabling them really bruises the image and doesn't improve framerate much.
- be sure to turn off anisotropic filtering (IGPs just don't have the bandwidth). Trilinear filtering is similar but I left it on "Default" (ie: only where needed) and made notes when I saw materials that suffered so we could fix them
- turn off most of the other stuff (local reflections, glare, grain, ambient collusion, volumetric lighting)
- paradoxically leave texture memory high; it'll use system RAM either way and if let it cache more it'll waste less time streaming
The other important thing is to get dynamic resolution to run properly:
- if you're native fullscreen this should just work fine
- windowed or borderless modes often get bogus GPU stats from the driver (we need to get accurate GPU timings to properly determine what resolution is ideal)
- try the Optimized Flip-Model (fun fact: in DirectX 12 this is the only mode)
- as a last resort: disable VSync and use Max Framerate instead; for some reason on my old IGP this meant I got accurate stats and "not too shabby" dynres 720p on a laptop with no discrete GPU from 2013
- another option is to run borderless 1080 and used a fixed user ratio of 50% or something brutal so it isn't dynamic and the driver's lies can't hurt us
I did a stream a year or two ago where I tuned up that laptop to "run" Deimos at mostly 30fps -- at this point I think the laptop was 7 years old so it was a bit of a stretch though.
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