ATI Radeon Xpress 200

[PsychoFox]

Hi,

I've got an older PC running Ubuntu 12.04. I've been using Linux for many years but not for much gaming and I haven't done anything with video drivers in Linux before today.

The video card I'm using is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200. I've spent a few hours today trying to install video drivers so I can play Portal.

Is this video card too old or is there drivers I could use? I'm not looking to play anything recent, I thought it would be able to handle Portal. Should I just give up until I have a newer PC.

Any help would be appreciated. Just let me know what information you need. I've removed any drivers I've installed and gone back to the original drivers.

Cheers,
Steve

[Zyro]

This is a 9 year old graphic unit integrated into the CPU. I cannot tell for sure, but my bet would be that this is by far not enough.

[Benjamin]

I'm pretty sure that your card ony supports up to OpenGL 2.0/2.1, which is not enough for Portal. I remember reading that the Linux port relies on a few newer OpenGL extensions due to some minor graphics improvements from the port. Unfortunately you're probably out of luck.

[Letalis Sonus]

The Source engine wasn't ported to OpenGL, Valve just put a D3D->OGL Wrapper around it, and that wrapper was made using some OpenGL 3 stuff. The wrapper is also available on Windows when starting with a certain parameter.

You don't need to install any driver, you already have one on your system. Support for this card ended 4 years ago, the preinstalled free driver is the only one still supporting this card (and it does a very good job). However, there is no way to magically give your card OpenGL 3 support.

[PsychoFox]

Thanks for the replies. They were very helpful.

Using Linux I can usually keep using the same computers for years for most things but they soon become obsolete for new games.

I might try to find a second hand graphics card that can support OpenGL 3. As I said I haven't done anything with graphics cards in Linux before. So any advice on a cheap card that would work reliably with Ubuntu 12.4 would be appreciated. If I can get this PC to play a few games it would be great but I know it wont be able to do much so I'm not going to spend too much money on it.

I've been interested in Shadowrun Returns, and Shadowrun Online (when it is released). Any idea what is the minimun graphics card required for these games? I know these might have to wait until I get another PC.

[Letalis Sonus]

Most people would probably recommend you a Nvidia card, as Nvidia's proprietary driver does not drop support for older cards that fast and it runs generally better than AMD's proprietary driver.

However, if you 'just want to play' you might as well get an used older Radeon HD card for cheap, the free driver offers the required OpenGL 3 support with those and it runs pretty damn well with Source based games - especially with a more recent system (Ubuntu 13.10 e.g.)

[PsychoFox]

I just found a Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS being sold locally.

Will this support OpenGL 3 on Ubuntu? Will I need to install drivers?

[Letalis Sonus]

The Geforce 8 and Radeon HD2000 Series were the first ones with OpenGL 3 support.

With a Geforce you will probably need to install drivers. While the free nouveau driver already claims to support OpenGL 3, the stability and performance differs vastly among the supported cards, so it would be definitely better to install the proprietary nvidia driver.

[Dusk of Oolacile]

You should just make a separate partition and install Windows XP. You'll have all the driver support Portal needs.