Subset Games Forum

As many people are aware, Intel has discontinued full support for several older desktop and mobile video chipsets with the release of Windows 8.

These chipsets, listed here, lack OpenGL 2.0 support in Win8, including ones that had such support in Windows 7. Intel won't even provide drivers for them on their own website, instead providing very basic drivers through Windows Update only.

People affected by this issue wanting to play FTL will experience an extremely long load time and laggy, choppy mouse cursor movement.

I encountered this issue on my Asus K60IJ laptop, which uses an Intel Mobile 4 Series chipset. Luckily, there are solutions.

Solution 1: Use the Teknogods Royal BNA Driver

The Royal BNA Drivers are enthusiast-modded Intel video drivers that enhance performance in many games, and fix bugs above and beyond the stock Intel drivers.

These unsigned drivers are for Windows 7 (since they're based on Intel drivers with proper OpenGL support), but can be installed in Windows 8 by temporarily disabling driver signature enforcement. This only needs to be done once, before installation. If you're not familiar with doing so, see this guide: http://pureinfotech.com/2012/09/05/inst ... p-by-step/

I'm using version 3.1 of these on my laptop now, and FTL works great. Download: http://teknogods.com/?p=951

Solution 2: Modify Windows 7 Intel video drivers

If you'd prefer not to install strange drivers from who-knows-who , you can modify the stock Intel Windows 7 drivers to work in Windows 8.

In this example, I will use Win7Vista_64_151719.zip from http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... ldID=22166.

- Extract the zip file to a folder named Win7Vista_64_151719
- In notepad, open Win7Vista_64_151719\Graphics\kit49684.inf
- Look for these two blocks of code: - Delete the "; no install on Win8" line
- Copy the lines from the [IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.0] section into the [IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.2] section
- Save the file

Now that that's done, reboot with driver signature enforcement temporarily disabled (as described in Solution 1), then manually install these modified drivers through device manager.

This was the first solution I tried, based on this article: http://www.neowin.net/news/how-to-insta ... -windows-8

It worked, but every time I played through a few sectors the entire laptop would BSOD. It might work just fine on your machine, though. If not, there's always the Royal BNA drivers to try.

Forum users are advised to be very suspicious of unauthorised drivers. There is a ton of malware out there pretending to be drivers. Handle with care and contact your customer support first. You paid for it, get something out of it.

UltraMantis wrote:Forum users are advised to be very suspicious of unauthorised drivers. There is a ton of malware out there pretending to be drivers. Handle with care and contact your customer support first. You paid for it, get something out of it.

Yup, good advice. Anyone with enough tech-savvy to use notepad should definitely try solution 2 first using drivers downloaded directly from Intel.

And if enough people make support calls to Intel, who knows? Maybe they'll reconsider and release some better Windows 8 drivers. At some point it must be cheaper to do that than field phone calls from angry end-users.

Thanks techknight for the advice! I thoroughly agree with contacting your laptop manufacturer + Intel to complain about driver support. Many indie games are hit by this poor OpenGL support and it'll only get fixed if it starts to look like a big enough problem.