[Bf-committers] Hardware support Policy

[Thomas Dinges]

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