[Bf-committers] proposal: OpenGL cleanup in master

[Brecht Van Lommel]

As I understand it, with OpenGL 2.1  the minimum requirements would be
effectively:

* NVidia Geforce FX, Gerforce 6xxxx and newer (released in 2003)
* AMD Radeon R600+, Radeon HD, and newer (released in 2006)
* Intel HD graphics or newer (released in 2010), some older cards
might still work on OS X and Linux

Mainly users with older Intel GMA graphics would be affected. That
sounds reasonable to me but we are raising the hardware bar for
Blender 2.77 then, right?

I totally support doing this in master. Doing OpenGL refactoring in
big branches hasn't worked well in the past, better to do it
incrementally. I can help with some refactoring and code review.

On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have my sword. And my axe. And my bow.
> I could trickle some free time on this, though not terribly much unfortunately.
>
> I definitely vote to do this on master/or current full dev branch (2.8
> branch?) when that changes. The previous approach of dumping chunks of
> code in a big branch that will code-rot as soon as time or energy
> dries out just does not work for such a big project in my opinion. We
> need an approach that will let us work on this incrementally.
>
> We should communicate well, with screams, on the street to
> unsuspecting pedestrians and on the net to unsuspecting surfers, posts
> on blender.org, in the manual and with ugly message boxes with bright
> flashing red letters (OK, I admit that might be pushing it a little
> bit), especially for the windows and mac people, that system
> requirements are now raised to 2.1, and add the relevant checks and
> warnings in GHOST to ensure that people who try to use blender without
> it, cannot do so anymore. Current approach on Windows is just spawning
> a warning messagebox. We can leave that in but also quit blender in
> case it does not meet our requirements, and also expand to a similar
> approach for other OSs.
>
> On 21/11/2015, Mike Erwin <significant.bit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi devs,
>>
>> I was responding to something in bf-viewport but could use a wider set of
>> people to either agree or put a stop to this madness before it's too late.
>> :)
>>
>> I'd like to start basic GL cleanup in master ASAP. By this I mean set GL
>> 2.1 as a baseline and convert all code that uses obsolete extensions to the
>> functions/enums provided by GL itself. Much of this is simply deleting ARB
>> or EXT, and removing checks for GL features that are guaranteed in 2.1. No
>> new features, no major rewriting, just get the code up to spec and ready to
>> branch for the bigger GL 3.2 upgrade.
>>
>> Staged migration of OpenGL:
>> now --> GL 2.1 (all platforms, soon)
>> --> 3.2 compatibility profile (Windows & Linux)
>> --> 3.2 core profile (all platforms, in time for Blender 2.8)
>>
>> That final transition will be the most work. The first transition can be
>> done NOW and doesn't involve any design really -- just a plan of what to
>> remove/convert. Dropping support for GL 1.4, 1.5 and 2.0 in one swoop will
>> let us clean up a lot of legacy crap without raising the hardware bar.
>>
>> Is anyone opposed to this? Anyone eager to help?
>>
>> Mike Erwin
>> musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
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