Minimum hardware for a 20-seat classroom — do we need discrete GPUs?

A current browser with WebGL 2 and hardware acceleration enabled. That is the whole list — integrated graphics (Intel Iris class) are the explicit design target, and the geometry budget is set for them: procedural models, shared materials, and set-pieces like the runway costing five draw calls. Discrete GPUs are pleasant but change nothing about whether the product works.

We would go further: test on the worst machine you own, because we do. The most serious rendering bug in this project’s history — a cockpit view that hard-froze the render loop — reproduced only on integrated graphics and was invisible on discrete cards. It came down to a degenerate depth-buffer ratio that a discrete driver tolerated and the Iris driver did not, and it was found by debugging on the classroom-grade hardware directly. The full post-mortem is on the blog ("640,000:1"). A vendor who only demos on workstations has simply never met that class of bug.

Practical seat notes: desktop or tablet both work (touch orbit/pan/zoom is supported), no install or plugin is needed in browser deployment, and locked-down profiles that disable hardware acceleration are the one configuration to check before committing — software rendering is the only setup we would call unsupported.