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

[John James]

Is it possible to make an installation check of future requirements and
display a strong warning (that is not easily bypassed by just clicking
"Next") that there is a plan to make them obsolete. This will enable users
to prepare beforehand and also give them possibility to object. If 50% are
still using the old features should they be faced with the fact "No new
updates for You!"? I am for the use of the latest features of the hardware
when they are present by the way :)

2014-12-31 11:55 GMT+02:00 Martijn Berger <martijn.berger at gmail.com>:

> 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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> >
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