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

Martijn Berger martijn.berger at gmail.com
Wed Dec 31 10:55:55 CET 2014


Hi everyone,

This is a great idea and should be effected as soon as possible ( 2.74 ).
As in practice blender does not run really well on graphics hardware that
is more then 10 years old anyway.
We can save ourselves a lot of bug reports and headaches by just adding a
check for this and warning users when we find less then OpenGL 2.1.
I am all for trying to keep blender accessible to a as large as possible
group of users.
But I think it is safe to say that anyone should have access to OpenGL 2.1
capable hardware as this translates to 10-11 year old hardware.





On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 4:49 PM, 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.
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