Why can I not use Blender without OpenGL3.3?

[Erisian]

I recently downloaded and installed the latest Blender and it won’t even open because my graphics card does not support OpenGL3.3 and there are no updates available for it. Somebody told me that you don’t need to render using OpenGL so why can I not open Blender and use the cycles render engine? Please excuse my technical ignorance.

[0451]

Blender uses openGL to draw the UI.

OpenGL was released in 2010. If you’re planning to do anything remotely complex it might be time to look for a PC upgrade.

[TheRedWaxPolice]

Trying to get Blender 2.8 to run on my old laptop

I have an old Thinkpad which has an Intel HD Graphics 3000 video card built in. Unfortunately, the latest Windows video card drivers only support OpenGL 3.1.0. I would like to try to run Blender 2.8 via Windows 10 on this laptop, even if it runs slowly. My understanding is that I should be able to run Blender 2.8 with an old OpenGL version via the command line like this: blender.exe -d --debug-gpu I downloaded blender-2.80-7e9389b83d8-win64 here, and when I try running Blender with the abov…

[Unreal3DFX]

Because older than Opengl 3.3 is really out of date. In near future Vulkan is coming:

[Erisian]

My video card supports OpenGL3.1. I have been told by a Linux user that he can open Blender in Linux without GPU as long as he doesn’t use OpenGL for rendering. Is he wrong?

@TheRedWaxPolice Thank you. I’ll give that a go.

[Erisian]

@TheRedWaxPolice

Good solution. Thank you very much.