[Bf-committers] Minimal Blender specs - 5 year old systems & OS

[metalliandy]

I understand where you are coming from but we will have to update 
Blenders minimum specs eventually as it will become harder and harder 
for devs to maintain as hardware becomes unavailable to purchase after a 
few years. Also we must remember that OpenGL has seen 9 updates since 
2006 with many things becoming obsolete and moved over to software 
support vs harddware acceleration, which is obviously much slower.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL

Low power does not always mean low performance and you can buy a 
decently performing system for much less than $1k. All that would be 
needed most likely is a new GPU every 3 or 4 years, which would be well 
in the realms of Open GL 3.3 support...even cards that were released 
almost 3 years ago support 4.3 and can be bought for under £50 and 560s 
can be purchased for around £100.

I guess it comes down to whether we all want to hold Blender hostage 
with legacy support or accept that increasing minimum specs will force 
some users to upgrade. No other 3d program retains support for the same 
length of time that Blender does and even 5 years is much more than most 
3d software vendors support for, which is commendable for Blender, but 
we need to be careful that it doesn't hinder Blenders performance or 
stops devs adding features that only new(ish) hardware supports.

Maybe an optimised version for tablets would be an idea? A "Blender Lite"?

There is a good place to look for average hardware...The Steam Hardware 
Survey. It lists the entire steam userbases hardware specs and would be 
a good benchmark for getting the average specs of modern PCs.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Cheers,

-Andy

On 29/01/2013 14:06, Dan Eicher wrote:
> IDK, I think a lot of users get hand-me-downs and there seems to be a trend
> of lower power (energy efficient) computer being made these days. Not to
> mention if blender ever gets fully ported to tablet-like devices.
>
> It might be better to target OS versions rather than hardware specs since
> computers haven't really advanced that much over the last five years other
> than throwing more cores at the problem. Something produced five years ago
> can still do 99% of what the average user needs and this target audience is
> probably a lot bigger than the amount of people that can plunk $1k down on
> a upscale box.
>
> As an aside, both of my working computers (a netbook & 5+ year old laptop)
> don't fall within these specs and aren't really good at *using* blender but
> are still good for testing.
>
> Dan
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