I long for the day that 32-bit bites the dust. What was the last widely used 32-bit processor architecture?
While I fully agree, I guess pushing that through for Blender would go about as smooth as ditching “deprecated” OpenGL legacy in OpenGL itself ^^
It would also create some unwanted “eliteism” locking out many IGP users depending on the extensions used, especially lots of iBooks.
i agree that XP is not supported by mircosoft so i guess blender can drop it too!
nothing wrong with that
but i still have a not so young PC (about 4 years) 32 bits vista with the G31/G33 intel chip set
which runs only on opengl 1.4
so for the time being i would like to be able to use it at least till the end of this year!
i’m beginning to look for a good sale on a new PC 64 bits but this may take a few months before i get a new one
only problem i see is that most of the new PC sold around here comes equiped with a radeon Video card
which are not supported !
so wondering if i will have to change this radeon card for a GT Nvidia card?
happy blendering
Radeon video cards are supported, just not for cycles.
If ever your computer doesnt work with blender, I am sure you can still use older versions up until you get your new PC.
Almost all “modern” IGPs support SM3 and those that don’t (e.g. the dreaded but widespread Intel GMA-950) probably don’t run Blender reliably, either. These chips are also the likely reason for Apple to not support certain older devices with their latest OS update.
If anything, it should be up to the developers working on OpenGL-related things to decide whether they want to support such inadequate hardware. I’m also not convinced that there exists a significant amount of users that use Blender productively on such devices.
Interesting info from Luxology website: Modo 601 requires:
- 2 GB RAM minimum
- Mouse or pointing device, including pressure sensitive tablets or 3DCONNEXION 3D mouse
- OpenGL 2.0 accelerated graphics, at least 1280 x 800 resolution
Requiring OpenGL 3.0 is a no-no; if one forces people to spend ~1000$ to get a new computer, they might be better off ditching Blender for Modo (personally I would consider seriosly the Modo path).
I did a bit searching on newegg. In fact its hard to find weaker stuff in market today.
CPU - 48$
Motherboard - 45$
RAM - 14$
Graphics card - 25$
New HDD - 60$
New Case - 22$
214 dollars and you get entirely new PC. Search prices in shops in your country for relative stuff, it can be cheaper. Of course you can buy used hardware for half of this price. Assumnig that vintage blender users have monitor younger than 6 years and have mouse thats the only costs for new minimal requirements. Not too much imho, even in my poor country.
Blender is supposed to run on a computer that cost 1000$ five years ago. As for OpenGL 3.0, I believe any PC sold at the moment will support it.
In any case, the difference between 3.0 and 2.1 isn’t dramatic, from a feature standpoint. The main point of OpenGL 3 was to declare the outdated stuff deprecated, so unless Blender was to get rid of all that stuff, there is no point in requiring a “clean” OpenGL 3 context, anyway.
I’m fine with it. If you want to use a 1,000 year old computer, use a 1,000 year old version of blender.
I personally welcome this decision. I tried Blender 2.61 last year on a P4 3.0 with a Geforce 7300 and personally I cant believe that anyone can enjoy working with something like 8000 polys max onscreen. However,
1.) Will this mean that standard builds require SSE3?
2.) Also what I dont get from Tons post is whether this is just a recommendation he puts on the main site or if there are fundamental changes codewise on the way that make such changes really necessary ( new viewport or something)
3.) 5-year support for hardware makes sense. However, given that the best to date Windows version was released in 2009 and that will be 5 years next year already, well I guess you know… Also that would mean that Vista is no longer supported as it was released in early 2007.
4.) If you were to buy a “1000”-currency PC in early 2008 that would roughly make an Q6600 or E8XXX/4GB DDR2/ GTX260/280/HD4870-sumthing config. This config, at least on the CPU side of things, is way more powerful than what Ton proposes as a 5-year old 1000-currency PC.
5.) With XP out of the way, and, following the 5 year guide, Vista as well, is there really any need for x32 any longer? ANYONE ( prove me wrong if incorrect) with a dual core has x64-compatability in hardware (aside from some Atoms). People who were unfortunate to get a x32 retail Windows can change to x64 for free - the keys are interchangeable. Or get (L)ubuntu- for free as well.
It’s good information to know. I’ve been working on an update to Beginning Blender and there is a section covering recommended hardware specs for running Blender at different levels. It’s not the sort of info I’d like to get wrong.
Of course, anyone going for pro-work on Blender is hardly going to be using the minimum spec.
The foundation already has officially dropped support for the old SSE instruction set a release or two ago (now requires SSE2 or newer).
I don’t know if they want to raise the requirement further to SSE3, but it may depend on how long it’s been around (whether or not its inception is before or after the introduction of the planned minimum spec. hardware).
Finally .
Afaik any x86- dual core has SSE3 compatability.
And why does my messages always appear as an awesome wall of text as soon as submit my reply? Thats definitely not how I wrote it 
I say “why not?” Even on a machine with the new minimum specs, it’s barely practical to do anything modern. It’s not like Blender will stop working (they aren’t dropping 32bit support or anything like that, it’ll probably still run). If someone with a machine like the old minimum specs grabbed a copy of Blender and sat down with a current tutorial, they’d face constantly running out of memory, multi-hour renders, and a claustrophobia inducing UI (IMO 1280x800 is still pretty tiny, 1440x900 is about as low as I want to go with it)
That’s the new TL;DR plugin for people too lazy to even decide if they’re too lazy so all they see is a wall of text and “Eh, no…”
I really dont understand what you mean by that ( no native speaker, so forgive me).
What I want is that this text is displayed on a new line.
Edit: Turn no-script off XD!
Um, that would be ARMv6, ARMv7, etc… you know - the chips iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, Microsoft Surface, netbooks, and a wide variety of low-power smart devices run on.
Not to say I disagree with Ton upgrading the system requirements they way he has… but 32bit is FAR from dead.
I only have one machine with XP on it that I still use, but it’s a netbook anyhow.
However:
Just one link of many similar ones basically saying that Windows XP market share is still on well over a third of the world’s computing devices. I know it’s old. I know Microsoft is dropping / has dropped support. Many people simply don’t care that much. Of course, that pie chart might look a lot different if it was skewed to people even remotely interested in computer graphics. Or not.
If someone has a commit in mind that will break XP usage, it might be an interesting week afterwards. Or not.
If you’re trying to get an enjoyable Blender experience out of an ARM-based CPU you’re doing it very, very wrong. There is absolutely no sense in supporting Blender on a platform that will be used by <1% of users simply so people can say “look I can 3D model on my iPad!” The BF coder budget is stretched thin as it is, no need to put superfluous and obscure platform support on their plates as well. It’s the very same reason PowerPC is no longer officially supported.