This inspired me to think of a simple star topology "router", but despite it being simplistic I still find it way too bothersome to implement it in Factorio. It would work like this:

l_to_p? = i.l.dest < mid | high < i.l.dest
l_to_r? = !l_to_p?
p_to_l? = i.p.dest < mid
p_to_r? = !p_to_l?
r_to_p ...

I had the same crash on start on Linux (Ubuntu 15.10) with the same video card, and the config.ini trick seemingly solved it. It's a little bizarre in that Factorio ran fine the first time I installed and ran it yesterday, but I guess more browser tabs open ate up the graphics memory or something.