Ancient Renderer?

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1

Godot Version

4.1.1

Question

So. Hello, I’m jmanbruh, someone who’s planning to develop a game I’ve wanted to for years over this summer. I had a very early version experimentally written in LOVE (GitHub - JManBruh/Rangefinder-0.0.1-Alpha: The very, very, very for-friends-only release of Rangefinder.), but I’m switching to Godot for… well, obvious reasons. But you see, I have a problem. I’m insane.

For the majority of my life, I was stuck on a HP Pro 3000, which had a Core 2 Duo E7500. That’s a 32-bit processor. What it also had, which was the invisible bane of my existence, was a GMA x4500HD GPU. The Core 2 line was juuuust before Intel started to put their integrated graphics on the CPU, so this graphics “card” is on the motherboard.

Yes, I’m writing this post on modern hardware; a Ryzen 5900x and a 3080M specifically (and it runs at 1200 fps with the compatibility renderer). But I can’t help but think some poor bastard is gonna try to fire up my game with one of these if I release it. I want them to be able to run my game. It’s 2D, after all; 2D games have been made since the 90’s with features similar to the ones I’ll implement. There’s no reason a system produced in 2009 shouldn’t be able to run it.

So, my question is, basically, is there some hack of Godot I can do which will force OpenGL 2.0? If a developer of Godot’s renderer looks at this, please reach out! I’d love to work with you.

2

The problem with older GPUs will actually be that GPU’s OpenGL/Vulkan (if it has vulkan) implementation through drivers. If your game is targeting Compatibility then you are already doing the most you can on just your machine, you will have to test on the older machine with it’s likely abandoned drivers.

You could build a export template with removes 3D and Vulkan, this probably doesn’t produce performance increases, nor improved compatibility, only a size decrease. This post goes through reducing the template size for the web, which has similar OpenGL ES capabilities.