February 15, 2015, 10:39:11 pm
We sometimes find that members are able to run Lumion without a dedicated graphics card, but this is always on an intermittent basis. It might be only for a few sessions, is never full quality, usually it's noticed immediately with patterns across the screen, and, through to Lumion not running at all.
The display in Build Mode which you have been mainly using, is specifically done to allow scenes to run in real-time on the PC. So it reduces the graphics demands by cutting back on a range of display items in order to allow the scene to be viewed, navigated and worked on. When scenes are rendered from Photo or Movie Mode, much higher quality and final graphics results are done, which requires much more processing and performance from the GPU (where most of the work is done). Other 3D software (for example SketchUp, Blender) may use the CPU to do most of the processing, and some use a combination.
Running Lumion with lower Editor settings can help also to run Lumion. With the low settings you mentioned of 1 Star and 25% Resolution, there is much less graphics processing required in Build Mode. For example, 1 Star Quality allows all of the scene to be viewed including Oceans, but does not include Water (it shows as a grey area) and has no shadows.
This may let the integrated card appear to work, sometimes for a scene or parts of a scene. But invariably, as content is added to the scene, and (as you found) when renderings are required, then the integrated card just does not have the performance required to work with Lumion. You may get strange image results as first posted, or Lumion will not appear to work correctly or even close down. The newest integrated cards have better performance, but still no where near what Lumion requires, and what is available from dedicated cards.