[Bf-committers] Bump MacOS minimum requirements to 10.15 for Blender 3.5

[Chuck Ocheret]

It seems to me that supporting Metal with a fallback to OpenGL for older versions might be equivalent to such a fallback for when a Vulkan implementation of the viewport gets rolled out. I have no idea how close that is yet. But I’m excited for an aggressive move forward to Vulkan and Metal since that will facilitate many new capabilities.

I suppose I’m voting for the 3rd option for now, even though it might be more work. That is unless new features enabled by Vulkan and Metal are forthcoming. I suspect those are far off so Metal only offers performance benefits for newer platforms.

~chuck

Chuck Ocheret
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ocheret


> On Jan 5, 2023, at 10:09 AM, Jeroen Bakker via Bf-committers <bf-committers at blender.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> A few weeks ago we enabled the Metal back-end for the viewport. By default
> Blender will start using OpenGL, but in the User preferences the Metal
> backend can be enabled. The first responses and test are very positive and
> currently it is very likely that Metal will be released as a secondary
> backend in Blender 3.5.
> 
> Currently Master is only able to build on MacOS 10.15 and above due this
> change. The current minimum requirement is MacOS 10.13.
> 
> So there are some options to consider here.
> * Do we release blender 3.5 with Metal Backend?
> * Do we bump the minimum version from 10.13 to 10.15 for Blender 3.5?
> * Add logic in many places to make sure that 10.15 code-paths aren't used
> when run in 10.13?
> 
> Sergey mentioned that there are already ideas to bump the version to 10.15
> for Blender 3.6. So this proposal is to do this one release earlier.
> 
> My proposal would be to do the version bump for Blender 3.5 due to these
> reasons.
> Would like to have some feedback if this is acceptable.
> 
> Jeroen.
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