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 <[email protected]> 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 > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
