Most games that are listed as not compatible with Intel HD graphics work alright on my laptop. Sacred Gold for example works perfectly fine.

The incompatibility warning is sometimes issued as a general recommendation, I'm guessing that in order to be on the safe side. What it often means is that a game won't run with Intel HD 2000 and older but if you have an Intel HD 3000 or newer, all you have to worry about usually are frame rates, not compatibility. Ironically, I've seen a lot of people having problems with powerful graphic chips whereas a crappy Intel chip will serve just fine, I'm referring to games with low system requirements of course. I've taken a gamble on some games such as the Daedalic adventures which say "shared memory not recommended" but I guess that mostly applies for people who only have the absolute minimum of 2 GB system RAM, I have 4 GB RAM and all the Daedalic adventures run perfectly fine.

Frankly, from that list I tried Empire Earth, and it indeed has serious graphics issues on my laptop with Intel HD graphics (while displaying fine on another laptop with Geforce chipset). It might matter which Intel HD chipset we are talking about, too. I haven't yet tried the other games on that list.

But overall, I haven't found Intel HD graphics to be that problematic for GOG games. In some cases it has worked even better than e.g. my Geforce laptop, e.g. in Gorky 17 (with the Geforce laptop, it simply crashes hard at least if I enable 3D acceleratetion. On the Intel HD laptop, Gorky 17 3D acceleration has some graphical glitches, but is quite playable.

Over Windows XP? Probably because XP isn't supported anymore by MS. Even GOG doesn't support XP officially anymore, at least with the Galaxy client if you are into that.

Over Windows 8? Windows 7 appears to be tad more compatible with many older games, even with its rainbow color problem.

I think Soundblaster compatibility hasn't really mattered ever since Windows gaming superseded DOS gaming (in 1996-1997 or thereabouts). For DOS games (on GOG) it obviously doesn't matter either, thanks to DOSBox/ScummVM.

The fact that 3D chipsets on 90s laptops were probably quite useless (after all, I don't think there was any laptop with 3Dfx Voodoo or Voodoo 2 chipset, because that is what 3D acceleration was back then mostly :)) doesn't really affect modern laptops' ability to play older 3D accelerated games. I've played lots of older 3D games on laptops ranging from around 2001 to 2013, and I haven't really noticed much of compatibility problems (more than what would happen on a desktop PC as well).

Haven't tried Empire Earth yet on this laptop but Gorky 17 works perfectly fine with my Intel HD cheapo graphics, no glitches or anything (GOG version).

Now you made me curious about how Empire Earth runs on my system, I'll keep my fingers crossed!

edit: Empire Earth works just fine on my Intel HD graphics laptop, no glitches or anything

Gorky 17: Was that with hardware or software rendering?

With SW rendering, no problems for me either. With HW rendering, the main menu of the game is funky (apparently the lightning effects go all wrong etc.), but the gameplay itself is mostly fine. Some odd extra polygons here and there during combat, but they are not a gamebreaker.

As said, it works much better with HW rendering than on my Nvidia-powered laptop, where it basically can't be played with HW rendering at all. On the Intel HD system it is merely a bit glitchy, and the SW rendering version works fully ok if those glitches are too much to bear.

Interesting. It may depend on the exact Intel HD graphics chipset, or even the driver version.

My problems are with Intel HD Graphics 4000 series with driver version 10.18.10.3496 (downloaded from Intel homepages, as HP's own drivers were far older and had lots of issues and lack of functionality, like lacking support for several common resolutions).

The game is pretty much unplayable for me due to the graphics. No matter, I will just play it on my other PCs where it seems to work better (ATI/AMD or NVidia graphics). Good to hear though this isn't necessarily the case with all Intel HD graphics systems, hopefully it is the newer systems which are more compatible.

I might put later a screenshot how the game looks for me, but now I have to go, hurry hurry.

See the attached picture how EE looks for me with Intel HD 4000. Flashing extra textures constantly, that is merely a snapshot.

That was fixed a few months ago with a new driver. Be sure you're updated.

Gorky works fine on my system with both Intel or generic graphics setting - it's all software rendering anyway since on board chips like the Intel HD family have no dedicated video RAM anyway. Looks and plays the same, I can't see a difference.

Only thing is that when I switch from one mode to another (Intel to primary driver or vice versa) then some games crash, e.g. Empire Earth. But when I reboot the game, it works with both settings, only changing the setting crashes the game. So I usually just leave it on whatever setting is there already, it makes no difference in performance anyway.

There isn't that much visual difference with HW and SW rendering in Gorky 17, but maybe the most visible clue is during combat: the green squares on the ground are transparent with HW rendering, and chequered with SW rendering. The other visible difference is how the textures on the enemies etc. are smoothed out with HW rendering, but it may be harder to tell without side-by-side comparison.

On many PCs the main reason to want to use HW rendering is that the audio may stutter badly with SW rendering for some reason.


Ok then, I guess I need to check for the latest driver. Mine is dated 11th of March 2014, it was the newest back then when I updated it.

I compared the two options "primary display driver Direct 3D" vs "Intel HD Direct 3D" which looks the same in every game I've tried so far. I didn't mean the "software renderer" option which does indeed use ugly dithering in Gorky and I see no reason to use that option unless the other two would crash the game, looks horrible like an old troll grandma!

So far, I haven't encountered any weird graphical glitches in my GOG games. Except for Cognition GOTY which as I found out looks wonky and full of glitches (nasty clipping errors etc) even on the highest settings on a high end system, it's just a subpar product that way so it's not my Intel HD chip's fault. Checked out some Youtube videos for comparison and the game looks awkwardly whack on all systems.

edit: Just remembered that Lords of the Realm 1 looks entirely like crap with glitches and everything when I last played it but hat's not an Intel HD issue, seems more like general Dosbox games problems. I forgot about it because I most often can't be bothered to try and fix my Dosbox GOG games, it's a pain in the neck and even though GOG Support has always responded very fast in the handful of times I contacted them, you still have to fix stuff yourself in the end.

i still have the CD version of Odium/Gorky17. i've never been able to make it work well with intergrated graphics chips(SiS chips, Matrox, and Intel GMA), but software mode works fine. with intergrated chips, it always caused a very annoying transparency bug; whereby all characters ,enemies, mouse pointer and main menu options would have completely black cubic blackgrounds. it looked awful.

I just installed the newest Intel HD 4000 graphics drivers from May 2015, and yep, now Empire Earth seems to work fine. So it was only about too old graphics drivers, even if they were from 2014. Nice, now I can play EE on this laptop too, not only my other PCs which I use less often.

Nice to see that sometimes new graphics drivers actually increase backwards compatibility with old games, rather than breaking it (as has happened to me with e.g. NVidia Geforce drivers sometimes). That was why I didn't see it as a top priority to keep these Intel HD 4000 drivers fully up to date either, but I guess I was proved wrong.

Maybe I'll try later also Gorky 17, if those small glitches I had with it are gone too.

Lol that screen. Good thing that it has been fixed.

My brother, his whole family and I all play EE over Christmas. 1 or 2 years ago, we all sat down and he had just upgrade to Windows 8.1. And wouldn't you know it, his 8.1 computer crapped out in the same way. We were very bummed.

I just visited last month and we had a big EE game and it was finally working. That's how I found out. :)

Glad it's working for you!