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OpenGL disallowed on intel chipsets?

by Richard McKinney · in Torque Game Builder · 10/13/2006 (12:30 pm) · 6 replies

In common/prefs/defaultPrefs.cs, it explicitly checks for intel graphics cards and turns off OpenGL rendering for them. I've encountered a few problems with D3D renderer on these chipsets (845, 945, etc) and OpenGL works flawlessly on the cards I've tested on.

It's set to not allow OpenGL by default for a reason though I'm sure. Any clue what that reason is so I know whether or not I'm just gonna introduce bugs on cards I haven't tested with when I tell it to prefer OpenGL on them?
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Torque Owner Thomas Buscaglia
#1
10/13/2006 (8:24 pm)
Good question. I have no idea, but Justin would be the one to ask. I'd shoot him an email.

Edit: Link.

Torque 3D Owner Richard McKinney
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#2
10/18/2006 (11:29 pm)
Thanks for the heads up Thomas. I sent him an email on Saturday about the issue, but haven't heard back yet. We're about push out a final test version of our game, so if I did manage to break more than I fixed, I'll update this and my thread in the bug reports forums with the new findings, but it's worked well on those machines tested so far. I wish there was a way to know at runtime if these video card related bugs were going to happen and I could swap renderers then. We added the ability to change renderers to the game just in case, but decided that for our target audience it would probably do more damage than good or just be confusing.

Thanks!

Torque 3D Owner Ken Paulson
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#3
10/19/2006 (10:56 pm)
I would guess that the drivers available at the time were complete crap, so they were banned at the time. Intel gfx chips have (historically) had really horrid drivers (not the the HW was great...). Newer drivers may have addressed some of those issues.

The "right" way to do this is to not just track device IDs, but also driver versions. Those kinds of databases can get big quickly and can be expensive and painful to maintain.

Torque 3D Owner Pat Wilson
#4
10/20/2006 (9:19 am)
Actually it'd be me not Justin. I followed a feature matrix from ThinkTanks compatibility testing since they did a ton of vid chipsets. Based on this is how I constructed that. In my experience, Intel GL drivers are total garbage. I have not seen their drivers improve at all, however with the new MacBooks using Intel chipsets, I would think that Apple would demand good GL drivers, since their OS runs through it.

Torque 3D Owner Richard McKinney
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#5
10/23/2006 (11:01 pm)
Thanks a lot for the information guys. Sounds like we mostly just have to hope there are newer drivers available for the cards in use. If you recall though, were the problems generally just perf issues, or incomplete/broken implementations? If it's just performance problems I'm much less worried about it since I'd rather have that by default on older machines (which will scale detail back anyway) and have it at least working on everything. From what I've seen with newer to somewhat recent drivers on these chipsets, however, puts performance on OGL in TGB way ahead of D3D, but we haven't tested with many very old cards with very old drivers yet, so I'll have to try that out. Thanks!

Torque 3D Owner Ken Paulson
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#6
10/25/2006 (12:36 pm)
I know there were issues of the "broken implementation" variety, both in D3D and OpenGL. Not that performance was so hot either. Unfortunately my mind is drawing a blank on the specifics of the brokeness, but it'd be driver-specific anyway. If you REALLY want to support these things the only thing to do is try them with a large number of drivers and note any issues. Alternately, find a driver version that you're happy with and if the user is not using that version, tell them to upgrade.