maybe one of the really, really old releases?
Wow!! anybody that want’s to make a build with it? I don’t know a thing about building or patching blender
it works on GT620m
Just wondering, is his work applicable to the BGE, in terms of OpenGL ES?
As far as I understand the mailinglists and the wikidocs, yes.
Truthfully, they don’t say it in detail, but the thing is that the realtime rendering of the viewport and that of the game engine both use opengl.
In the intergrated viewport plans, the realtime rendering of the viewport will literally become the same code as the realtime rendering of the game engine. So yes, everything that happens in the viewport GSOCs will benefit Blender’s game-engine functionality in the future.
Wow! Blender 2.42 worked perfect on my old pentium 233 with 64 MB ram. No 3D card, so game engine and 3d view works at about 12 fps.
It´s going to work perfect on my tablet!.
Nobody else thought that blender need to drop old hardware to get better performance and features?
… i don’t think that processors below dual cores are enough to satisfactorily model, animate and render anything.
And OpenGl 1.1 really hurts performance in actual Pc’s and workstations, Opengl ES will hopefully solve some performance problems but i was expecting a jump to Opengl 3.3 that has a pretty good compatibility with most hardware.
Even an old 6600gt (and all Nvidia 6000 series) has Opengl 3.3… if anyone here are using older hardware than that (“Using it” not installing blender in a 486 just for laughs but not using it) please let me know.
It could be a good idea to create a survey to look what hardware is not used anymore so blender devs could drop some old hardware that are not in use anymore to benefit the hardware that the rest of users have, or even blender could ask if we want to send our specs automatically the first run to helps the development.
As for removing old hardware I think Blender is not in good position to drop old HW. Unless Blender would be widely used by professionals its bad idea to force community (mostly hobbyists) to upgrade their PC. Also implementing new OpenGL stuff wont be IMO easy task. And there are areas which needs developers attention more than just-updated draw code, like particle, fluid and softbody sim, BGE, sculpting etc. Just my opinion.
If you’re running hardware older than OGL 3 you’re not going to get anything out of Blender anyway. And it’s not like the older versions are ever going away.
However lofty might seem one of the core ideas of this GSOC, “freeing computer graphics programmers from the cost associated with programming in low level languages”, personally having made the leap to Blender C coding recently, I must say the idea of having yet another abstraction layer (OpenGL itself is one already) standing between me and having full control over what Im drawing feels kinda limiting. Such an abstraction would be most welcome to have as part of the Python API (which is at the moment stuck with OpenGL immediate mode) but anyone foolheartedly enough to mess with Blender core code certainly wont refrain from doing some dirty “low-level” OpenGL calls. Still, Im not that experienced yet and the higher advantages of this whole project might be totally out of my grasp. :spin:
Just one more remark, “the rising importance of mobile devices”? :eek: They cant be serious… Blender is a power app, not a toy? Makes me start picturing myself trying to select verts on a small touchscreen with my index finger… Or are they targeting these with the BGE? Surely really efficient viewport code can hardly be based on the same abstraction layer as a game engine?
Really, I must be missing something here…
“the rising importance of mobile devices”
I think that is mostly foccused on having things like the blender player or even a blend-file viewing app work on mobile devices. When those kind of things come around, it would be nice to have a unified system.
Or, because Blender is open-source, allowing that kind of groundwork to be reused for open-source 3d applications for mobile devices. Like, if someone wants to make a sketch-up-like program for tablets, all the boring opengl stuff will already be done by this project.
I must say your perspective is most wonderfully enlightening!
Blender is not a toy, a tablet is not a little phone, you can use a keyboard and a mouse with any android tablet or connect hdmi screen.
My cheap tablet, can run complex BGE scenes and renders.
These images are proof of it, I took them using last year’s port to android, i could click nearly all tiny buttons using a mouse.
Blender GUI, animations run smooth while moving timeline:
Game Engine with GLSL materials:
I’m not sure with the mobility Gpus but all the desktops ones in the google doc are Opengl 3.3 capable.
A modern Opengl implementation could bring some features and performance improvements… and not being stuck with deprecated functions and apis will help with a less buggy experience in pretty much all hardware.
Do note that on Linux, even if your graphics card is DX11 capable, the opensource drivers can often only support up to opengl 2.1, and installing the propetairy ones is not exactly fun.
mobile gpus are mostly OpenGL ES 2.0, the new galaxy nexus 7 is the first tablet to have OpenGL ES 3.0
The Opensource drivers are almost there, mesa 10 hopefully will bring 3.3 support next month, 3.2 support was confirmed and i heard that 3.3 extensions are almost ready… so hopefully it could be released in the mesa 10 release (next month?).
Opengl 3.3 can get support faster if programs start using it… is like when a new Gpu are released and the driver need to get support for it… if you never release the gpu then you’ll never get support for it.
@CoDEmanX no one is talking about opengl es.
@Therahedwig i wouldn’t say writing “apt-get install nvidia-current” into a console and hitting enter is fun but it’s certainly not complicated.
Guys, what are you discussing about here? Using modern OpenGL to speed up rendering basically means getting rid of fixed function glBegin() glEnd() stuff in favor of Buffer Objects and shader based rendering. That’s all stuff that has been available since OpenGL 2.0.
And the most important difference between OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 2.0 is the Geometry Shader and really, no one needs Geometry Shaders anyway …
Just to make it clear: Most likely there won’t be any compatibility differences because as of now there are already parts in blender that use more modern drawing code. Refactoring the drawing code just means completely getting rid of all the outdated stuff.
Ahahahahhh… heh.
Last time I installed the propietairy drivers Blender wouldn’t work. Then of course, I did not give up and tried to install the latest version of said drivers. Then the xserver wouldn’t crashed.
This happened two weeks ago. These were Ati drivers, and I tried my best to make them work, because damn it, I wanted those drivers installed. I gave up after finding that the error message generated by the xserver error log was, to put it in xserver.org’s terms ‘generic’.
So no, I would not consider installing propetairy drivers fun or uncomplicated.
Even if nobody uses those geometry shaders, the BF needs to be clear with it’s user base. So it also needs to set a hard line.
Edit: btw, I have a dx11 capable card, but Mesa won’t enable it beyond opengl 2.1, which is not really mesa’s fault, but rather a problem with the rest of the driver that glues Mesa to my card. This is complete nontech speak btw, I know nothing about drivers, it’s just what I could find on the internet when I noticed my card doesn’t go beyond OpenGL 2.1.