Guide to Running PPSSPP on Intel GMA 965/X3100

[neilencio]

Instead of waiting for PPSSPP to start supporting D3D (which would be unfair to the devs, as it's not their fault that Intel's IGPs have crappy drivers), you can already run some games in fullspeed on an Intel Gma 965 Express (also called X3100) by doing a few things:

1. First, if PPSSPP is crashing on you during startup, you're probably using the stock drivers that came with your motherboard/laptop. Those don't have support for OpenGL 2.0 so You need to update to a newer one. There's no need to look for 3rd party drivers, the newest one from Intel is good enough (the version I'm using came from Intel, version 15.12.75.4.1930)

2. Once you've updated your drivers, PPSSPP will no longer crash on you. But you'll only get black screens with a white square on the side. You need to disable buffered rendering.

3. Hardware transform is a bit hit and miss, there are games where it doesn't break anything (Dragonball Z shin Budokai 2), but in a lot of games it results in missing sprites/models (Bleach HTS7, Crisis Core, etc) so disable it if you're not seeing any of your characters. The IGP is too slow to help increase speed, anyway.

4. Frameskip is also something that's a bit hit and miss. Some games it helps make slowdown manageable, and in others it flickers like crazy regardless of how many frames you skip.

5. Obviously, you need to turn off all the bells and whistles. If you want texture scaling and filtering, you're using the wrong PC.

6. At this point PPSSPP is already playable, but one thing you'll notice is that you can only play fullspeed in a window. Once you go fullscreen it stutters like a 10 year old boy who's just seen a naked woman for the first time. If you want to play in full screen, you need to do the following:

7. Rightclick PPSSPP's executable, go to Properties. Then click the tab for Compatibility.

8. In the Compatibility tab, make sure the "Run in 640 x 480 resolution" is checked. Press Okay.

What this does is ensure that everytime you run PPSSPP, your desktop's resolution changes to 640 x 480, which is near enough to the Windowed resolution that it doesn't stress the IGP much. PPSSPP currently scales the resolution to whatever your desktop is set to, which is why there's a marked slowdown for very slow IGPs when you go fullscreen.

The laptop I'm using:

Dell Latitude d630

CPU: Core 2 Duo T7500 2.0 Ghz (I have IDA disabled so it doesn't boost to 2.2 ghz)
Video: Intel GMA 965 Express
RaM: 1 GB

Games I have tried that ran fullspeed:

Dragonball Z Shin Budokai 2
Bleach Heat the Soul 7
Dynasty Warriors Strike Force
YS 6: The Ark of Napishtm

Games I have tried that worked, but were too slow (20-40 VPS):

Tekken: Dark Resurrection
Dragon Ball Tenkaichi Tag Team
NBA 2k13
Final Fantasy: Crisis Core