[Bf-committers] Hardware support Policy

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

We can define this quite practically; there's just two guidelines imho:

1) The hardware as in use by the developers
2) The minimal specs we agree on for acceptable code (to not hold back  
development)

This can be defined quite fair, and doesn't need to disqualify certain  
brands or types or configs, unless the above doesn't apply :)

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 13 Jun, 2011, at 14:28, 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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