ember 0.6.0 is now working with i965 devices
  • Mr.+AndersonMr. Anderson January 2011
    A bug that prevented ember from running with Mesa on Linux has been fixed:
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26920

    This might concern all GMA devices, using the i965 Mesa driver: X3000, X3100, X3500, (4500?), X4500, X4500HD, 4500MHD and maybe also the integrated chips HD Graphics, HD Graphics 2000 and HD Graphics 3000.

    With a GMA X4500HD and some DDR2-667 RAM, ember runs now fine for the first time. The sky is mostly black, but everything else seems to be alright. Well, it is rather slow, but with some tweaks, the performance is more or less sufficient for playing. I guess with the latest classic Mesa drivers, the absolute minimum for playing ember on Linux is a GMA X4500 with RAM not slower than DDR2-667.
  • erikerik January 2011
    That's excellent news! I wasn't aware of that bug report; I'm happy to see Ember helping out with improving the drivers.
    It might be mentioned though that the current default world is pretty unoptimized for Ember, as the steep hills effectively disrupts the LOD system for the terrain, resulting in quite a lot of polys on screen at once.
    I'm not familiar with the GMA chipsets. Is the GMA X4500 a newer one?
  • Mr.+AndersonMr. Anderson January 2011
    GMA X4500 and X4500HD are part of the G41/G43/G45 chipsets which are not really new. They were launched in summer 2008, but can still be found in trade. It is the last generation of Intel GPUs that are part of the chipset and not integrated into the cpu.
  • %5BDeleted+User%5D[Deleted User] January 2011
    Awesome news! Hopefully we can in time cut down the number of questions like this we have to answer. :)
  • Mr.+AndersonMr. Anderson January 24
    As an update to this posting: with ember 0.6.2, this chipset does not seem to be sufficient any more. However, chances are good that it will be playable with fast versions of Intel HD Graphics, which is the successor of Intel GMA. HD Graphics 3000 (fastest implementation in Sandy Bridge) or better might be worth a try. (I can not say for sure as I do not own such a device.)
  • erikerik January 30
    Do you know what kind of issue arises with 0.6.2 and that chipset?

    I have a HD Graphics 3000 on my laptop and can report that Ember runs, although with some artifacts. Kernel 2.6.39.4, x11-driver-video-intel-2.15.0-4, lib64drm_intel1-2.4.26 (I don't know which, if any, of these are of interest).
  • Mr.+AndersonMr. Anderson February 13
    I just gave it a try with Mesa 8.0 - this gave a huge performance boost. ember 0.6.2 is even playable again with my GMA X4500HD.

    Problems that I still encounter:
    - black sky
    - setting graphics detail level to "high" renders most textures black

    I can not tell you what problems might appear with Sandy Bridge. However, I suppose it will not be worse than with my Eaglelake chipset. You can try switching to Mesa 8.0. This solved lots of rendering issues for me, not only in ember.
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