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

[Alexandr Kuznetsov]

On 1/29/2013 9:48 AM, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Tablets are all multicore and have OpenGL ES 2 or 3, which is quite modern compared to what we use now.
>
> -Ton-
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
> Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands
>
> On 29 Jan, 2013, at 15:06, 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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Hi.

I don't know what you mean by minimal specs.
Blender can run fine on 1.5 GHz dual CPU with integrated graphics card. 
(Even on tablets with some redraw optimizations)
Also, about OpenGL 2.1. Blender doesn't yet need shaders to functions as 
most drawing is done using GL 1.x.
Moreover, I would advice against using shaders directly with GPU 
compatibility layer (which hopefully will be merge soon). Then we can 
easily migrate to GL 3.x without modifying shaders. All drawing will be 
done through gpu layer in order to support GL ES and GL 3.x.
It is better to have "Supported Specs" so user wouldn't complain why 
they cannot load a complex scene.

Alex

P.S.
On the other hand, we should drop >10 years old OS (cough XP)