[Bf-committers] Proposal: Up blender requirements to OpenGL 2.1

[Mike Erwin]

Hear, hear!

Setting OpenGL 2.1 as a foundation gives us a large feature set
to work with, reducing our reliance on extensions that might or might
not be available at run time. For example VBOs and GLSL 1.2 are
*guaranteed* to be there so we won't need conditional checks or
ARB suffixes for those functions/enums.

When would be an appropriate time to require 2.1? As in refuse
to run if less than this?

I have a growing list of still-nice-to-have extensions that have not
been adopted into core OpenGL as of 2.1. Half the list is on this
machine and the rest on Windows -- I'll put together a full post on
this topic soon.

Mike Erwin
musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello again,
>
> The times of fixed function OpenGL pipeline have been very fun and
> happy, with coders trying to ingeniously hack the fixed function
> parameters to do the things they wanted.
>
> But I believe we are getting to the point where fixed function OpenGL
> starts holding us back. We already require GLSL support for some of
> the fancier features of blender, but probably it's time to feel free
> to consider shaders as the primary display mechanism if we want to,
> without needing to code fallbacks to a fixed function alternative.
>
> Especially anything that requires mixing multiple textures (such as
> texture painting with masks or brush overlays) or attributes in a non
> standard way is difficult without shaders.
>
> This is scheduled to happen as part of the viewport refactor, but
> having the hardware requirements there will enable us to do more
> improvements now.
>
> The proposal is not about throw away every legacy path next release,
> rather than assuming that users will need to have access to newer
> hardware from now on if they wish to access core features. Shader
> availability can be tested to avoid crashes but no alternative
> rendering path should be provided for those not meeting the
> requirements.
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>