No setting, but i've never ran into a extension listing overflow crash with older apps and games as far as i've seen. Vanilla GLQuake's the one to test for that, and that works on ati hd, but not on Geforce (the whole series overloads the extensions)

Sorry, can you clarify?

I'm on Nvidia, and had to enable the limit for a number of games to get them to run.

I think, as you said, they were all GL Quake I and II engine based games, like GLQuake, Hexen II, GLQuake II, etc.

You're saying ATI doesn't have this control, but then it doesn't need it cuz there never is a problem running such games?

a long time ago ATI actually shipped two OGL ICD's with their drivers and you had to manually rename them if you wanted to play any Quake 2 engine based games. Eventually they fixed the issue and combined the fix...ever since then I haven't had an issue. Been awhile since I tested tho.

I read somewhere that people were contacting ATI about putting the opengl extensions that are oldest in the front of the string since old games were having issues detecting extensions because of static opengl extension buffers used in the code.

I had a problem with this not to long ago. I wanted to play Medal of Hono(u)r, and it kept crashing because of such an overflow.
The solution for me was to place either atioglxx.dll from ver.513 or from ver.612 and atioglx2.dll from ver.712 of their drivers into the game's directory. 😖

If you look at atiogl.xml in the drivers dir, you'll see game specific overrides, so I guess the answer to your question is 'no, they don't' 😢

Mind you, I have an old radeon 9800, and am stuck with their 'legacy' driver, so maybe this has changed with newer releases, but I have my doubts.. 😜

Right now I think only Heretic 2 and Sin need this extension limit. There are newer ports for all the other games and they overcame this issue.

Anachronox needs it as well