Is there a way to run Blender without using hardware acceleration. I have troubles with the ATI drivers I’m using (I have a HD 4850), and I believe blender would work just fine if it ran on the CPU only. It may not be quite as good, but atleast it will run.
Thanks.
I think you can just run it on intel intergrated graphics, but you can humbly forget about using the new GLSL features, making decent graphics level games with the BGE, or playing BGE games with half decent graphics.
How? How can I use blender without hardware acceleration. Also, what are GLSL features?
I have the “intel integrated” situation on my laptop. Blender is a little glitchy even before it goes into the GE.
On Ubuntu, blender runs software-only if you don’t install the propiatery drivers. on windows, I dont know…
Though if you run blender under software rendering, you wont be able to create meny polygons(few thousand max) before it starts to lag very badly.
On linux you just switch from using the hardware based OpenGL to the xorg-x11 software version. (On Gentoo you just run “eselect opengl set xorg-x11”)
Not sure what you have to do to switch that on windows…
I think you can just run it on intel intergrated graphics, but you can humbly forget about using the new GLSL features, making decent graphics level games with the BGE, or playing BGE games with half decent graphics.
For the most part, yea. An old intel integrated graphics card can run up to 60,000 - 70,000 faces (about 100,000 polys) with a decent frame rate if the game is set up correctly.
However, blender will never run above 55 fps, you will not be able to use GLSL, and it may act glitchly (but it depends on the version you have. A 2003 intel driver works very well, but 2005 intel driver crashes blender often).
Search on your system for OpenGL32.dll (it should be somewhere in C:\Windows\blah, if it’s somewhere else, you’ve got the wrong version of the dll).
That’s the software implementation. Copy the dll and place it in the same directory as blender.exe
Run Blender and enjoy the crappyness, completely brought to you by the crappy GL 1.1 implementation from Microsoft!
On windows you can turn down hw acceleration by turning off all eyecandy stuff and choosing windows classic theme. Also go into the control panel for your card and turn off any goodies, AA, FSAA, etc.
On linux the easiest way is to get the static binary from http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.47 - those are linked against mesa, which is software OpenGL. The best part being that you can keep your drivers installed 
/Nathan
actually, this does not work for me on my gentoo laptop installation, i an also having slow-downs using hirect rendering,
i wonder what is the solution apart from disabling hardware acceleration in the xorg.conf and restarting WM…