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

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Alexander,

With minimal specs I mean this:

- The reference we test Blender for and ensure it keeps working.
  (startup settings, OpenGL defaults)

With average specs I mean:

- The reference we release and configure and design Blender for.
  (UI layouts, tool designs)

Of course you then can still use Blender on a 1.5 Ghz cpu with simple graphics. But users of older hardware should expect to fall behind in performance and usablity, or even need to accept that a future release might not work anymore.

All this assuming we don't have people to support such old systems, and that we might accept code and design in Blender that's not working (well) on old systems.

Tablets (Android, or other) are a special case here. That project is still WIP and with unclear outcome, especially how this will result in usable software. I'm extremely motivated to get tablets supported well, but not at the cost of limiting our software for 3D professionals working on film, animation or games.

-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 16:20, Alexandr Kuznetsov wrote:
> 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)
> 
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