Sorry but opengl 3.3 is a 5 year old standard supported by almost all graphic cards except old intel and I guess sub par opensource drivers

Sorry, but Grim Fandango is a 17 years old game, re-mastered in a way that it uses somewhat better textures and much improved sound, and I guess it is reasonable to expect that the graphics engine it uses can rendered correctly even without any GPU acceleration at all.

It's not the improved textures that have pumped up the requirements up to a somewhat ridiculous OpenGL 3.3, it's the shaders and the new rendering engine used for the "remastered" mode (which is totally different from the original).

Most people would have preferred something with less glamor and more hardware compatibility, but I guess the devs thought otherwise unfortunately.

So if you happen to be the unlucky owner of a GeForce 7950 GT, which is still a pretty decent card even by today's standards (though a bit outdated, I admit), you would not be able to play this remastered version of a game that originally required a Pentium 133 or above and a 2mb PCI card.

That doesn't seem even a bit ridiculous to you?

It's 9 years old and even nvidia driver support has been stopped for that graphic card.

And you can't really compare the original system requirements which also had the game resolution probably at 640x480 if not lower.

Plus the lighting with shaders what has been done even though it isn't much makes it a totally different requirement on graphic cards. It's probably limited to opengl 3.3 because of shaders they used which also worked on playstation 4. And to make it work on older cards they had to rewrite the shaders.

The game works just fine with AMD open source drivers, despite the warning on the page.

Can you please post which ones (kernel / mesa version) for the reference? Thanks!

It would also help if you could let us know what AMD card you're using please.

I haven't been able to get it working on my Radeon HD 6450 with mesa 10.3 / kernel 3.16 (on Mint 17.1 64bit), and I'm not that eager to use ppas to update my graphics stack just yet...

Interesting... it may work with radeonsi then and no so much with r600g, or maybe it will work for me as well once I sync up everything with Mesa master.

Maybe I'll give it a shot.

Thanks.

Probably things have improved in the recent kernel / mesa. So you can retest it in the future and specify with which versions it works.

Fair enough.

I've even double tested and it still does not work for me :P, though it seems to be working for people with newer AMD cards/open source driver revisions.

The same thing (no AMD open source driver support) is mentioned in the Double Fine Grim Fandango FAQ section on their support forum, so I thought something was amiss even before I tried it out myself.

Anyway, I was looking into figuring out what the technical impediments were and why the Double Fine developers were unable to get the game working with the drivers.

Someone has suggested that some broken (aka non-standard compliant) shaders are causing crashes in the driver, and that Double Fine is reluctant to fix these as they are tolerated in the proprietary drivers. I tend to agree with him on that bit:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/16367

Maybe we'll see a fix from Double Fine somewhere along the line, but I'm not betting on it. It's my last pre-order ever.

Anyway, it's not your (and I mean GOG's) fault at all so I hold no grudges :P.

I think the standard GOG policy at the moment is to support Ubuntu 14.04 / Mint 17 along with whatever versions the drivers have in the default repositories of the distros.

Asking the average gamer to upgrade his graphics stack in Linux in order to play a game is a bit of an overkill imho, though I expect most Linux users to have a rough idea of what that involves.

Anyway, it all sounds like a support engineer's nightmare, so I don't think this will ever happen :).
Ehm, no... Broken Age works, Psychonauts, Costume Quest to name games from Double Fine. And then I've also played and finished Deponia 1, 2, 3 on the AMD open source drivers. Guacamelee! also works...

In fact Grim Fandango Remastered is the first game that won't start for me (and for which I meet the hardware requirements) from the entire GOG selection of Linux games that I own.