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

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Nobody of the active team suggested to stick to Nvidia. Blender should remain cross platform, as wide as possible.

I have the impression the crits here interpret my proposal far too negative. I tried to define it a positive step forward (for our future), and to come with a clear definition of what we should do minimal. A minimum spec doesn't mean we could still support more.

For any hardware or OS falling outside the minimal spec anyone can step in.
Just offer to maintain the platform's build system and make the releases.

Optionally some patches could be applied for it, or some newer modules/options won't get compiled in for the very ancient systems.

-Ton-

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

On 31 Jan, 2013, at 6:13, Tyler Mercer wrote:

> Saw someone mentioned requiring Nvidia video cards and thought I'd put in
> my two cents. PLEASE DON'T DO THAT! There are dozens of recent laptops out
> there that only have Intel GMA GPUs. I have an Asus laptop with a Core i3
> processor (quad-core, I think), and it currently runs Blender just fine.
> 
> - Tyler Mercer
> On Jan 29, 2013 6:35 AM, "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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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