[Bf-committers] proposal: OpenGL cleanup in master

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Mike: good plan, thanks you're having the time and energy to tackle it.

My main concern is that it shouldn't lead to a non-functional Blender. If that's the case, I rather see it happening in a short lived branch, just to be sure we don't frustrate people who depend on using the last version of Blender. There is other development going on too.

Any estimate on how much work it is, and/or how to get others to help?

Brecht: good list. A long while ago we've stated a guideline that "Blender should work on decent quality hardware you purchased new 5 years ago." With Intel fixing up their graphics chips in 2010 we're now safe to move on :)

-Ton-

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



> On 21 Nov, 2015, at 22:16, Brecht Van Lommel <brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:
> 
> As I understand it, with OpenGL 2.1  the minimum requirements would be
> effectively:
> 
> * NVidia Geforce FX, Gerforce 6xxxx and newer (released in 2003)
> * AMD Radeon R600+, Radeon HD, and newer (released in 2006)
> * Intel HD graphics or newer (released in 2010), some older cards
> might still work on OS X and Linux
> 
> Mainly users with older Intel GMA graphics would be affected. That
> sounds reasonable to me but we are raising the hardware bar for
> Blender 2.77 then, right?
> 
> I totally support doing this in master. Doing OpenGL refactoring in
> big branches hasn't worked well in the past, better to do it
> incrementally. I can help with some refactoring and code review.
> 
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You have my sword. And my axe. And my bow.
>> I could trickle some free time on this, though not terribly much unfortunately.
>> 
>> I definitely vote to do this on master/or current full dev branch (2.8
>> branch?) when that changes. The previous approach of dumping chunks of
>> code in a big branch that will code-rot as soon as time or energy
>> dries out just does not work for such a big project in my opinion. We
>> need an approach that will let us work on this incrementally.
>> 
>> We should communicate well, with screams, on the street to
>> unsuspecting pedestrians and on the net to unsuspecting surfers, posts
>> on blender.org, in the manual and with ugly message boxes with bright
>> flashing red letters (OK, I admit that might be pushing it a little
>> bit), especially for the windows and mac people, that system
>> requirements are now raised to 2.1, and add the relevant checks and
>> warnings in GHOST to ensure that people who try to use blender without
>> it, cannot do so anymore. Current approach on Windows is just spawning
>> a warning messagebox. We can leave that in but also quit blender in
>> case it does not meet our requirements, and also expand to a similar
>> approach for other OSs.
>> 
>> On 21/11/2015, Mike Erwin <significant.bit at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi devs,
>>> 
>>> I was responding to something in bf-viewport but could use a wider set of
>>> people to either agree or put a stop to this madness before it's too late.
>>> :)
>>> 
>>> I'd like to start basic GL cleanup in master ASAP. By this I mean set GL
>>> 2.1 as a baseline and convert all code that uses obsolete extensions to the
>>> functions/enums provided by GL itself. Much of this is simply deleting ARB
>>> or EXT, and removing checks for GL features that are guaranteed in 2.1. No
>>> new features, no major rewriting, just get the code up to spec and ready to
>>> branch for the bigger GL 3.2 upgrade.
>>> 
>>> Staged migration of OpenGL:
>>> now --> GL 2.1 (all platforms, soon)
>>> --> 3.2 compatibility profile (Windows & Linux)
>>> --> 3.2 core profile (all platforms, in time for Blender 2.8)
>>> 
>>> That final transition will be the most work. The first transition can be
>>> done NOW and doesn't involve any design really -- just a plan of what to
>>> remove/convert. Dropping support for GL 1.4, 1.5 and 2.0 in one swoop will
>>> let us clean up a lot of legacy crap without raising the hardware bar.
>>> 
>>> Is anyone opposed to this? Anyone eager to help?
>>> 
>>> Mike Erwin
>>> musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>> 
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