openGL woes with Intel HD 3000 Win 7 64bit.

[idata]

Hi,

I've got a brand new HP Pavilion g6-1241sa Notebook PC Win 7 (64) - Intel i5-2430M 2.4Ghz with HD 3000 integrated GPU.

I play an opensource openGL game - Oolite which is a space sim in the mold of the classic Elite. This is not a demanding game, it will load under software rendering openGL 1.0, albeit with a very poor framerate. My old xp laptop (about 6 years old) with a ATI Radeon Mobility x700 GPU played it just fine. For full graphical features it requires openGL 2.0.

Out of the box the default loaded driver supplied by HP (8.15.10.2372 openGL 3.1) could not play the game. It would load, but 2D GUI screen backgrounds were missing, whilst in the the 3D spaceflight part of the game view positions were completely messed up and when graphics could be seen there were lots of texturing artifacts. Same problem with the authorised HP driver 8.15.10.2476 openGL 3.1. I've also tried the generic Intel 8.15.10.2509 downloaded from here with no luck - same problems.

All these drivers fail the rendering tests in realtech VR's OpenGL Extensions Viewer 4.0.

After much headscratching I managed to find an older HP authorised driver for this hardware on the HP website - 8.15.10.2279 - openGL3.0. This driver passes the OpenGL Extensions Viewer 4.0 rendering tests and the game graphics are nearly all working as they should. My remainings problems with this driver is that enabling Vsync does not have any effect (it appears to always be off - the game frame rate is a solid 99 versus a display refresh rate of 60hz) and there are some annoying texturing anomolies (maybe related to lack of V-sync?). This driver also passes the OpenGL Extensions Viewer 4.0 rendering tests.

The remaining texture anomolies are with complex models that are a main model with it's own texture along with seperately defined and textured sub-models 'glued' on to make a whole. The problem is that the main model texture is often bleeding over the various sub-model textures making for graphical ugliness. Any ideas? I'm wondering if there is a later driver build with working vsync, but still on openGL3, as the later openGL3.1 drivers appear to have borked openGL compliance.

[idata]

OK - issues all solved with the help of a patch from the game devs. The game is now working well with both older openGL 3.0 drivers and current openGL 3.1 drivers.