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

[W. Nelson]

A "graceful degradation" of Blender features on older/XP/Mac systems would be best IMO.  So a development strategy of a fault-tolerantBlender that does not crash or break on older systems would be to proactively disable features when incompatible with detectable hardware. This is a strategy that all could benefit from, especially longtime professionals with legacy niche hardware/software solutions.

For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault-tolerant_system

JTa
 


________________________________
 From: Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>
To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 5:35 AM
Subject: [Bf-committers] Minimal Blender specs - 5 year old systems & OS
 
Hi all,

I propose to update the minimal spec for hardware on the Blender site. This was getting very ancient now.

Old:
  1 GHZ Single Core CPU
  512 MB RAM
  1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
  3 Button Mouse
  OpenGL Graphics Card with 64 MB RAM

New:
  32 bits, Dual Core CPU with at least 2 GHZ. 
  2 GB RAM
  24 bits 1280x800 display
  Mouse or trackpad
  OpenGL Graphics Card with 512 MB RAM

I really like it when Blender runs well on any OS and older computers. There's practical limits we need to cope with though:

- Support for old systems is impossible without any developer using it.
- There's demand for good support of modern hardware specs.

As rule-of-thumb we could define our minimal support level as "Decent quality new hardware and OS you would purchase 5 years ago for 1000 dollar".

If we can keep that work, systems with less specs might work, or not... but that would be in the unsupported category - unless a volunteer steps in to maintain it well.

It also means that we could drop Windows XP this year, Vista was released 5 years ago.

For OSX we failed keep 10.5 work (october 2007). Also for PPC that's not possible anymore afaik. OSX 10.6 is quite recent (june 2009), but the current minimum we can support. If an OSX 10.5 user/developer steps in, feel welcome!

-Ton-

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

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