Hello there!

It seems I am having regular problems when I try to play games on Slackware: I tried Steam, and most of the games won't start due to "Incompatible OpenGL version (needs at least Opengl 4.3, which my card is capable of)", or won't load many textures, making games unplayable. I thought that was due to the 32bit libraries Steam needs (the i915 drivers are compiled without many capabilities for Slackware, like Gallium), but after compiling the 64 bits libraries and finding that I have the same kind of problem with modern games even if they are not from Steam, and require 64 bit libraries I gave up:

I know all those worked fine on my computer, as I played regularly when I had ARCH.

I do have 3D acceleration: It seems the problem is when I try to load any game that requires Opengl 4.1 or more; What can I do? It seems that manually compiled Mesa drivers with the "i915" argument compiled in the gallium section won't help either...

Thanks in advance

Mesa is limited to what is supported by the API. Intel uses Free Open Source drivers unlike Nvidia and AMD.

The Mesa 11.2.2 release includes OpenGL 4.1 support, but to use Gallium you might need to rebuild the Mesa package to include the i915 and ilo Gallium drivers as the traditional i915 and i965 drivers are built using the Tungsten API system. Slackware usually doesn't include Gallium support for Intel probably due to the fact it's been more experimental than actual driver support. The i915 is more complete, but the ilo driver is a true experiment driver. It's really best to just use the Tungsten drivers for Intel.

You may need to check and see how your configuration file for the Intel driver is set up.

Question: Are you using the DDX Intel driver, or are you using the Modesetting EGL driver for your main rendering agent?

Intel does only support OpenGL 3.3 in released versions of mesa (git has OpenGL 4.2) like the one in current and that should be the same with every distribution.
Intel gallium is the LunarG ILO Gallium3D driver and lags far behind the official driver and i can't see why anyone would want to use that driver for anything more then developing or testing.

What you need to do to play games the require higher OpenGL versions is to use an mesa override and some luck.
By default it will use the highest version your driver advertises.
You can override the version with "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=430 %command%" in the steam launch options and hope that it works.
This shouldn't be distribution specific but rather general for all distributions and should need mesa overrides in arch as well.

If you use steam on slackware64 then you should have an multilib install

2 members found this post helpful.

Yes, actually I sorted out with an override playing under ARCH, but that didn't seem to work here... Not to count that ALL the Total War games will start and not load textures (engine problem)?

I can compile mesa and just add i915 on the Gallium section no problem, but I don't see any difference. However it seems for both replies that it is not the best driver to use?

How could I use tungsten? Is that the default? the mesa.Slackbuild only offers the possibility of adding cards into "DRI_DRIVERS" (i915 is included on the list), "GALLIUM_DRIVERS" (no i915) and "EGL_PLATFORMS" (no i915).

Because my card is not listed under EGL by default, I am assuming I am using DDX. To be fair, I am lost with all those technologies and I have no idea. As including i915 on the gallium list doesn't seem to affect the results, I am going to add it on EGL, even if I have not idea what that does.

I'll tell the results, and again: Thank you for the replies!

The egl platforms are the underlying subsystems. Leave them be.

The i915 Gallium driver is not going to support your HD5500 chipset. It's supported by the DRI(Tungsten) i965 driver. The i915 driver is for older GMA9x0 series graphics.

The ilo driver is very experimental, but it is helpful for usage with Wine (using Nine), but yes it's not very complete.

You may need to upgrade to the -Current branch of Slackware to get OpenGL 4.2 level support.

Are you running current or 14.1?
The gallium drivers are called ilo that's why i typed the name in my latest post --with-gallium-drivers=ilo what driver did you use running arch?
Arch use --with-gallium-drivers=i915,ilo,r300,r600,radeonsi,nouveau,svga,swrast,virgl in there build so try i915,ilo
What does or doesn't work when using mesa overrides on current may differ from update to update and if your lucky your games work.
I'm not sure what OpenGL there is for your hardware i mesa git since it differs much on hardware generations.

Keep in mind also the Arch's Mesa package is going to be newer than 14.1's Mesa, so -Current/14.2 might be better suited for your needs.

If you do rebuild for Gallium, and you build ilo, you will have a wider level of driver choices for the DDX driver. You can add the driver option option "DRI" "ilo" line to enable ilo driver protocols, or simply use option "DRI" "3" to use the normal mesa driver.

You could also allow the egl driver to load by using the modesetting driver and enabling glamoregl support in the driver options. It's much simpler to do, and you still get full acceleration of video but equally in 2D and 3D with full OpenGL support. Either way you size it up, you have support, but you do need to upgrade your system to gain the full benefits.

Would installing libtxc_dxtn from slackbuilds.org in 32-bit solve the problem with textures? I had to install the library to play games using open source AMD driver.

It might with compressed textures, but Intel supports the FXT1 texture compression method developed by 3dfx which is compatible with s3tc textures.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello. Thanks for the replies.

As I was a bit on a hurry to fix this before my holidays finish, I ended cleaning up my hard drive and switching to other distro. (I also got bored of waiting for 14.2, as I had lots of tiny issues that would require a fresh install and I was waiting for the new release). I was using current, as 14.1 wouldn't work on my laptop (pe, webcam, GPU where too new for the controllers and the stock Kernel, though it would be easier to switch instead of compiling by hand those) I am still keeping Slackware -current for my "main" computer. In the end I didn't manage to fix the graphics. This is what I did:

I compiled the Intel drivers as recommended: (I even made a virtual machine under qemu to do the same there, emulating a 32 bit system in order to get the 32 bit drivers).

I changed the driver used in xorg.conf.
I tried the overrides and didn't got rid of the OpenGL error message (but that worked under my new distro)

Sadly I couldn't try "libtxc_dxtn" because I did switch distro before I could read the reply. Even if I keep Slack on my main computer, that one is a 2007 laptop, so I already know it won't even start any of those games (because of the hardware). But if 14.2 is released before I die of old age, I'll try it again and tell the results, as I am guessing it will also need some extra work.

Thank you very much for the help!