You are right, it's cheap vs. advanced notebooks. Unfortunately, "cheap" reflects to "old-fashioned shaderless OpenGL 1.4". "Old" is even less, like pre-1998 OpenGL1.2. I don't know whether dropping 1.2 support makes any significant change in today's user base, performance or stability, but dropping 1.4 and requiring 2.0 would be a major cut, excluding all purely-Atom netbooks, and IntelGMA notebooks, of which there are really many. The first reasonably fast and OpenGL 2+ capable graphics solution from Intel seems to be the current HD2000/HD3000.
A bug report from 2011 I have just seen relate to 2008 Intel drivers provided by notebook manufacturers, when Intel released updates in 2011. Driver support was notoriously bad from Intel, but has improved, although I saw problems on a 400EUR i3/HD3000 notebook with a WebGL site sometimes losing texture. If Stellarium ignored Intel-related bugs, or at least those related to pre-2011 drivers, it may immediately "solve" many problems related to older Intel drivers. Also, while developing/testing scenery3d, we identified differences in GLSL "code tolerance" between ATI/AMD and NVidia, so there is still two systems to carefully test all shaders with. I have not installed/tested this branch on that i3/HD3000 (my father's) so far. I can also imagine, using it on a Hybrid notebook and forcing to the Intel graphics will allow longer use to drive telescopes from battery-powered laptops. So, I am afraid, Stellarium should keep both, having a wide user base (it is widely used in educational outreach also in poorer countries!), plus making use of modern hardware for advanced functionality, if available. My 2c, Georg On Di, 21.02.2012, 14:13, Reaves, Timothy wrote: > So, with 50% or more of the registered defects being OpenGL related, this > is the area that needs work most. Fabian has stated that some of this is > due to supporting multiple versions of OpenGL. Doesn't sound like a hard > decision to me. > > And to inflame some people even more, I'll point out that it's not about > supporting older laptops; it's about supporting CHEAP laptops. There is a > very big difference. Both of my Mac laptops - an eight year old PPC and a > six year old Intel - run Stellarium great. Better than 60 FPS. No > trouble. These are old laptops. My work laptops are only leased for > three > years, and any more two is common. > > Now, as we do not have active contribution from any OpenGL developers, the > point is largely irrelevant, but, if we did have them, the we'd really > want > to decide what we want to do: continue to support cheap laptops, or be a > world-class Astronomy app. > > > > On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Bogdan Marinov > <daggers...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 2:58 AM, Georg Zotti <georg.zo...@univie.ac.at> >> wrote: >> > On Mo, 20.02.2012, 23:51, Fabien Chéreau wrote: >> >> [snip] >> >> The OpenGL state is not so much a mess as you seem to think, but it >> is a >> > bit complicated for 2 reasons: >> >> - we still support old graphic cards which don't support shaders, >> and >> >> using the fixed pipeline is quite different than using the shaders >> baed >> > one, so maintaining both is by nature no so simple. >> > >> > There are lots of Intel GMA notebooks with only support OpenGL1.4, >> > practically every "office notebook" before Core-i3 or so. I always was >> > happy my cheap Atom netbook can run Stellarium, maybe this (OpenGL1.4) >> is >> > the currently weakest platform worth considerng. The scenery3D plugin >> > requires shaders for advanced effects, but still has basic >> functionality >> > for 1.4. Requiring OpenGL2.0 (shaders) may be a hard decision for many >> > users of older PCs. >> >> +1. A lot of people are using Stellarium on laptops/notebooks/netbooks >> that don't support OpenGL 2.0, because they need something that they >> can easily carry "in the field", especially for telescope control. >> >> My main computer at the moment (and probably for the next two years) >> is also a netbook that doesn't support OpenGL 2. So, dropping the >> support for less-able graphics hardware will prevent me from >> contributing to Stellarium. :) >> >> Regards, >> Bogdan Marinov >> >> >> -- DI Dr Georg Zotti VIAS-Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science University of Vienna ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Stellarium-pubdevel mailing list Stellarium-pubdevel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stellarium-pubdevel
