[Bf-committers] Minimal Blender specs - 5 year old

Jed Frechette jedfrechette at gmail.com
Sat Feb 2 19:27:39 CET 2013


On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:00:01 -0700, <bf-committers-request at blender.org>
wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:36:22 -0800, Chad Fraleigh <chadf at triularity.org>
wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Jed Frechette <jedfrechette at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> FWIW, I see 3D content creation as a fundamentally high-end endeavor.
>> Being able to start learning Blender on low-end systems is great.  
>> However,
>> I want Blender to be taken seriously as a professional tool, not just
>> something you play with until you are able to afford "real" hardware and
>> software.
>
> That sounds like a rather narrow view. Wouldn't this be like telling
> musicians that they _can't_ make a career unless they sign up with
> some major recording label that has "real" resources (that then takes
> 90% of the artists' money).

I think you are misinterpreting me. I was simply trying to point out that
one of the costs of making 3D art is CPU/GPU cycles. There are reasons  
that today we can run programs like Blender on our desktops when only a  
couple decades ago the only places you would find comparable tech was in  
research labs and studios. Those reasons have a lot to do with how much  
more powerful our desktops are today.

All art is limited and shaped by the tools available to the artist.  
Someone with a Yamaha keyboard will make different music than someone with  
a Steinway grand piano. Neither one is inherently more beautiful but they  
are different. Blender shouldn't target the lowest common denominator any  
more than it should limit itself to users with 16-core Xeons, Quadro  
cards, and 1 TB of RAM.

Regardless, my more important point was in the second paragraph. I would  
prefer Blender's limited resources be used to move the project forward  
while releasing tested versions on a reasonable subset of hardware and  
software configurations. Five year old hardware certainly meets my  
definition of reasonable. Blender.org does not provide a build for SPARC  
Linux but people who care about that architecture, e.g. the Debian  
project, do. If people care enough about keeping the latest Blender  
running on Windows XP or 98 or 3.1 there is nothing stopping them from  
working on it.

Regards,

-- 
Jed Frechette


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