OpenGL support for occasional old gaming

[Black]

My current computer is old - the last time I rebuild it was 5 years ago when the hard disk crashed, and I don't know how many years I've had it before.

I'm not a gamer, but at that time I was playing Neverwinter Nights (the first one, that I bought in 2002 - yes, that's 18 years ago). At that time, an nVidia chipset looked like the best option, and it ran fine. Time went by, and I stopped playing, so when my onboard GeForce 7025 was no longer supported by nVidia (from what I can tell, the last driver to support it is 304.64, which was removed from Portage a long time ago), I switched to Nouveau, which is fine for non-gaming.

Now I'm thinking about getting a new computer, but I'd like to play Neverwinter Nights again. I figure any recent video card will be at least as good as a GeForce 7025, but as you can see, I will be keeping it for quite a while, so I would like something that supports OpenGL with open-source drivers, since I cannot assume that the manufacturer will keep supporting it.

An onboard graphic card would be fine - I have no use of a $3000 graphic card as I will not be playing any 2020 game anytime soon, if ever - I want to play a game released 18 years ago!

With that requirement putting nVidia out of the picture, the common ones I can think of are Radeon and Intel. Are those good choices regarding long-term OpenGL support? Other suggestions?

[sdauth]

Ryzen 4750G (APU, that is CPU+GPU) with a B550 motherboard and some DDR4 sticks.
The only issue is to find the CPU as it is OEM only IIRC. Otherwise, a 3400G instead with a B450 AM4 motherboard. (cheaper, and you could eventually find good deals during Black Friday, if there is one )
I have the same use case as you, old games (Halo, Far Cry, Half-Life..) and a couple of emulators (mostly arcade) and everything runs great on my old AMD APU (A10-6800K) (7 years old already and it supports OpenGL 4.5)

[Hu]

I had decent, but not great, success with the integrated graphics on a recent generation Intel CPU. The apparent failure mode was that the game used up more application memory with the Intel driver than with the driver for a discrete amdgpu. The game in question was sufficiently memory hungry that the extra size caused by the driver made the difference between fitting everything in 2GB, or not. When it didn't fit, I would get random crashes due to unhandled memory allocation failures. I could get the game to run reasonably reliably with all detail set to lowest. I ended up switching to a discrete radeon card driven by amdgpu, and now I can run the texture at whatever detail level I want and not exhaust address space.

If you don't mind the chance of paying an extra round of shipping charges, I would start by using the onboard graphics of your new CPU, and only add a discrete video card if you encounter problems. On the other hand, if avoiding the shipping charges for an order of just a graphics card matters, or if you can find a graphics card you don't mind buying in a somewhat speculative manner, buy a graphics card supported by the amdgpu driver. There are various Wiki pages that summarize how well supported each family is. Pick a card that is considered well-supported. These are often a little bit older, but should still be easy to find for sale as new (as opposed to buying a used card). For your stated use, almost any card still on the market as new should be sufficient to run the game itself, once you have the driver situation in good order.

[Black]

Well, I certainly don't want to pay extra for a dedicated card, when 99% of my use doesn't even require OpenGL. But I would like for that remaining 1% to work.

So what I understand is that a Radeon chipset is well supported with open source drivers, right? Regarding the Intel GPU, given that Neverwinter Nights is 18 years old, 2GB video RAM will probably be plenty. The developer in me doesn't like that there be unhandled exceptions in the code though...

[ct85711]

As far as Neverwinter Nights, it may depend some on which version you are playing. The reason is that, some devs actually took up updating the Enhanced Edition on steam fairly recently again. How long they will maintain it again, is questionable. I do recall those devs said they wanted to update the graphics engine, but later call in defeat on that portion of the code was way too old and won't be able to update that. I suspect they may have the same issue in other areas too; and abandon it again. The nouveau may very well, be enough for older games. Sure they don't have as good of performance or support the new OpenGL versions, but that doesn't matter for games 8+ years ago that was designed for systems for that age (older games can't use the newer GL instructions, so not supporting GL 4.x has no meaning).

[Black]

I bought the Neverwinter Nights box in 2002, then the two extensions after that, so we're talking the original one, not from Steam or GOG.

I'm running the Nouveau driver right now, but I have no OpenGL at all, so NWN doesn't run. My question is really driver support for the graphic hardware long-term, not the game itself. My onboard GeForce was running NWN just fine while I could use the nVidia drivers.

[Ant P.]

I've been using radeons since my last nvidia card burned out in 2006. The drivers are fairly well maintained, even the old HDxxxx models from around 2010 still get new features occasionally.

Something previous-gen but cheap is usually safe; they always release the expensive cards first and the low-end ones show up after the worst driver bugs are ironed out.

[Hu]

[Black]

I admit it's been years since I switched to Nouveau and lost OpenGL, so I don't recall what I did and did not try. I'll have to give it another shot.

When I switched to Gentoo in 2002, I had a lot of time to play around. Then some woman came along in my life and short people appeared in the house not long after...

[Chiitoo]

Indeed, that looks like one of the perhaps better supported chipsets for nouveau (looks like NV40) [1], so I'm a little bit curious myself on what's going on there.

I've had mixed success with gaming, using a GTX 275 and GTX 960, but for the former I had no fan control at all, and that card can get hot... so not great for any heavy lifting. The latter enjoyed better support, but I did have some pretty glitchy stuff going on in some games with it (last I tried was years ago already though).

1. https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
_________________
Kindest of regardses.

[Black]

I'm following this guide ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xorg/Hardware_3D_acceleration_guide ) and everything looks good in the kernel config - the only difference being that I use built-in rather than modules. However, I don't have a config file for X - my understanding is that it's no longer needed. The permissions on /dev/dri and /dev/dri/card0 look good; not exactly the same as in the article, but I have the equivalent for my user / group. Somehow I don't have glxinfo and glxgears, but I'm compiling Chromium at this time so I won't be able to move further until at least tomorrow.

Also not seeing anything obvious in the X log file:

[Hu]

glxinfo and glxgears are provided by x11-apps/mesa-progs.

[Black]

Hmmm... Okay, glxgears works just fine, so I do have OpenGL. Looks like my issue is not what I thought it was...

[Black]

Ok, nevermind me, I'm stupid. Trying to run a 32bit program on a 64bit only system...