[Bf-committers] Hardware support Policy

[Terry Wallwork]

On 06/13/2011 01:28 PM, Thomas Dinges wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> Blender is a pretty modest application, regarding hardware requirements.
> If you are lucky, Blender 2.5 still opens and runs on 10 year old hardware.
> How good/fast is the question.
>
> With 2.6x I think it is time to make the official support policy a bit
> more strict.
> We still have some bug reports inside the Tracker related to old
> hardware, especially to Intel GPUs.
>
> First of all, I am not saying we shouldn't try to help people who only
> have such hardware. But we shouldn't officially support it.
>
> LetterRip already suggested in IRC to raise the Minimum OpenGL Version
> to 2.0 which would give some benefits. And I completely agree.
> With Blender 2.6 many new features will come into Blender as well, which
> means we will introduce new technologies like OpenCL as well.
>
> It would help developers as well, if we would know what we have to take
> care of, and what can be closed in the tracker.
>
> Basically I am not saying we should lock out users of old computers, but
> we should focus on Hardware which is 5-6 years old. I think that is
> sufficient.
> This way we could concentrate on new technologies and not always
> worrying about "If this works on 10 year old systems as well".
>
> What I officially would drop support for:
> -All Intel onboard GPUs., older than 3/4 years, which are really bad!
> -Systems with less than 1GB of Ram. Would prevent some crasher reports
> due to low memory.
> This doesn't mean that Blender won't "run" on these systems, but if
> people encounter obvious hardware related issues, they would not be
> allowed to put them inside tracker.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Again, this would be for the 2.6x series only! For 2.5x we can stick to
> what we support now (although this is not clear as well...)
>
> Best regards,
> Thomas
>
>
>
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Hi,

On the official support hardware issue.

My laptop uses said crappy intel chipset and is less that 2 years old.  
Intel is the most popular integrated chipset (crappy though they are).  
And if you stop supporting crappy intel chips you will in effect be 
blacklisting a large amount of recently made laptops.  And it worth 
nothing that even today there are brand new laptop you can buy with 
integrated intels that are still crappy.  People will buy them because 
they work for everything else.  It is going to be a long time before 
intels gets its act together with gfx chips and sandy bridge and the like.

The other issue is that Blender is used by a lot of people with low end 
hardware, students, kids, etc etc.  I am not saying its a bad idea to 
not support high end hardware, but I do think that we should support the 
low end as well as the higher end.  Some form of graceful degradation 
should  take place.  The last thing Blender needs is to alienate a fair 
portion of it's user base because they don't have the newest laptops.  I 
don't take in to account desktop at this point because they way things 
are going with desktop sales it wont belong before laptops are the only 
game in town.

Terry Wallwork