Hello. In a developer meeting notes, it was announced that the devs might stop supporting some OpenGL 3.3 cards.
I own a Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 1GB vram GPU, and although Eevee doesn’t really work due to a driver issue (everything is black unless you turn off lights shadows - and even then rendering is not ok ), other features work. The Workbench and Cycles work great. Instead of deciding to not support the entire Blender 2.8 for older GPUs, is it possible for them to just disable Eevee on unsupported hardware ? If in the stretch week, they decide to stop supporting older GPUs, then I guess that I will have to find the latest working beta version. If they ever take that decision, I hope that they take it as late as possible, so that a more complete beta version would still be available.
I really have no reason to comment, but cmon man. If you need the latest and greatest software you may just have to upgrade a component in your workstation every 12 years.
You could probably find an agp card that supports ogl 4, it’s almost a decade old. But I imagine you only need to find a pci card, not express, just regular old pci. Something tells me that you have some sort of pcie available though.
Whatever you are working with, you have to start thinking about the time and energy offset versus, I dunno probably $200 for something entirely new. I am talking everything not just gpu. Be willing to spend a weekend researching and shopping around.
Save a few hundred and use 2.79 while you are waiting. Am I out of line here?
Yeah there’s an agp 5450, ogl 4.4 under $50 a handful of places. Haven’t seen old pci anything. Go ask reddit or something there’s people out there who live to just figure out what the best pc is for a certain budget.
If you want the latest software tech, do an effort on your side a bit instead of asking the tools to be modified for your very obsolete specific needs.
I think that you are right. In order to evolve, Blender needs to take advantage of newer hardware. Still…Blender is getting near the end of Beta. Currently it runs well, with the exception of Eevee. People had expectations from the very beginning that Blender 2.80 will support any OpenGL 3.3 hardware. Some started projects in it.
If the devs say that my GPU will no longer be supported, will this mean that they will simply block Blender from even running on my system ?
No. Dropping support means no official debugging time will be dedicated to this hardware and tickets will be archived.
The main issue is that (it seems) that opengl 3.3 support across hardware / operating system is pretty uneven and a lot of old hardware have driver bugs that are quite difficult to workaround (or even understand). So instead of putting a lot of resources in hardware that is (mostly) very old we just say we won’t fix these bugs.
the good news, is that in the latest builds, and even with the latest mesa -devel, so I don’t know what it depends on … on my old laptop with the radeon hd 2600 so previous to opengl 3.3 … now blender works with solid view (also matcap shading) … so support was largely achieved as it was with blender 2.79 … ok eevee does not work well … but never mind … at least on this old blender hardware can be used as it was with blender 2.79, and in my opinion this is a great thing
if there was a sort of “eevee software-cpu-render” for the functions not supported by the old hardware opengl would be the best compromise ever …