Not sure if I am just blind, but I find it almost impossible to find the “Requirements” page. It seems to only appear as an extra footer near the bottom of the “Download” page. Ideally it would be in the main footer or otherwise seen on Features and Support pages.
But most importantly I think it needs to be very visible at the point that download is initiated. I think the current “info” link should be removed and its small amount of content put on the page itself. And then that link replaced with “Requirements” that goes to the requirements page.
And on that page itself…
We should make the top two “advertisement” boxes less prominent, and/or move them below somewhere.
The three sections (minimum, recommended, optimal) could easily be reduced to two to ease readability. For example minimum ram can be “4 GB” but recommended can be “16 GB or more”. In most cases it is not necessary to state that more of something is better, or that newer or faster is an advantage.
For display we are explicit about the resolution for minimum, showing “1280x768 display”. Yet are not explicit elsewhere using “Full HD display”. Best to spell out “1920x1080” if that is the intent. Similarly optimal shows a plural “Full HD displays”. If that intent is to show multiple it would be best to spell that out with the word “multiple”
Pointing device section is confusing in that all computers meet the minimum because they will all come with mouse or trackpad or pen+tablet. I’d remove mention of those as they are less requirements and more “supported hardware” so could be in a section just for optional supported hardware.
I also have some issues with “Supported Graphics Cards” as “supported” can be thought of as something that can be taken advantage of, but is not required. As in “Blender supports tablets, touch devices, VR, etc.” So I would consider changing that to a more explicit “Minimum Supported Graphic Cards” or even “Required Graphics Cards”.
And lastly, the lists of supported cards is does not help most users very much. At the very least it should list our current blacklisted cards and drivers. And probably have a section about hardware capable of GPU rendering rather than a link to another page.
It might be nice to see if the user’s current browser supports window.navigator.hardwareConcurrency and if it does use that to indicate that the current processor is fast enough since the reported number is the number of logical processor cores. So meets minimum if 2, recommended at 4, optimal at 8 or more. Obviously do nothing if this JS function is not available.
Similarly, it is worth considering using WEBGL_debug_renderer_info if available. It could just be shown the user or checked against blacklist drivers.
Cheers, Harley
