Why do we need nLove?

[BozoDel]

LÖVE uses OpenGL, and some devices don't have that, ok. But I've read stuff like, if you want your game to run on a GPUless laptop, you just have to disable stuff like spritebatches and shaders.

If that were the case, then nLove would be pretty useless, so I must be missing something. How necessary is OpenGL for LÖVE, and what OpenGL features does nLove replaces with SDL?

[slime]

Basically all of love.graphics uses OpenGL in order to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

[BozoDel]

Basically all of love.graphics uses OpenGL in order to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

So let's suppose my computer has a very very old graphics card, with no OpenGL support. Standard LÖVE won't work AT ALL for me?

[slime]

So let's suppose my computer has a very very old graphics card, with no OpenGL support. Standard LÖVE won't work AT ALL for me?

If your desktop/laptop computer doesn't have a graphics card which supports OpenGL (raspberry pi aside - which does support OpenGL ES 2), it wouldn't be powerful enough to run basically anything made in the past 13 years.

[BozoDel]

Hm, ok then. But in this post about pixel effects, people in the comments section talk about how they don't work on older computers, even though most of LÖVE does. Would that mean that they have an older or simpler implementation of OpenGL?

[slime]

Yeah, it means either their GPU can't use programmable pixel shaders at the level of complexity LÖVE requires, or the driver they're using for their GPU doesn't support it.

If the GPU's hardware has support for DirectX 9.0c, then as long as the drivers have equivalent support for OpenGL, it can use LÖVE's shaders/pixeleffects.
This includes any ATI/AMD and nvidia GPU released since around 2004, and Intel GPUs released since around 2007. Unfortunately a lot of very low-end laptops/netbooks shipped with ancient Intel GPUs until fairly recently.

[BozoDel]

Hm, got it! So SDL can only partially replace OpenGL. Thanks, slime!