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

[Jeffrey]

I want to give my opinion on this as well, since I also sometimes run 
absurdly old hardware.

I am sometimes stuck on an old laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook CF-50 from 
~2000.
Pentium M 1.7 GHz single-core processor,
upgraded to have 1 GB of ram,
ATI 9600 GPU with a whopping 64 MB of vram.

On that note, when I ran Windows, I had a terrible time running Blender 
for more than 10 minutes at a time and with any more than about 10k 
polys. It would eventually start blanking out regions of inactive UI 
until I manually reactivated and forced a redraw of the region, which 
would then get wiped out when I move to another region (ie 3d view from 
properties). I have a little more luck with Fedora 20 with XFCE, 
although it's still unusable for anything beyond simple modeling.

I think it's pretty safe to say that 14-year-old hardware simply cannot 
keep up with realistic needs of a 3D artist, whether for production or 
for just playing around. I would say it's safe to upgrade to OGL 2.1+ 
and simply ignore anything older. I would really like to make the devs' 
lives much easier by abandoning such archaic bricks as this.


On 01/21/2015 11:42 AM, Mike Erwin wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:23 AM, brita <britalmeida at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Upgrading the minimum to 2.1 does not mean that Blender does not use higher
>> OpenGL features.
>> It can always query for the ogl version and use the available features,
>> resulting, for example, in more performance.
>> There is no need of a separate build.
>>
> Should we strictly use extensions for anything newer? That would have
> almost the same effect as using a higher version while making it more clear
> what we support.
>
> The question is if versions older than 2.1 can be dropped in order for
>> developers not having to loose their time coding fallback methods for
>> (very!) older versions.
>>
> Yes yes yes! Or not forget/neglect to code a fallback for something I
> *assume* is available on a random user's system. Check for 2.1+ at startup
> and so many assumptions are verified. The much smaller number of useful GL
> extensions is easier to remember to check.
>
> Mike Erwin
> musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
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