I don't think any desktop computer released after 2010 would have issues with GL3 unless the hardware/OS is defective in some way.
On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 11:43 AM Jon Evans <j...@craftyjon.com> wrote: > Does anyone have a good sense of which hardware / software platforms would > be impacted by a switch to OpenGL 3.0 as baseline requirement? > > As far as I am aware, all commercial tools in the space have more advanced > / modern system requirements than KiCad, with the possible exception of > Eagle. We have to consider whether supporting old graphics cards goes > counter to the desire to have KiCad handle more professional use cases > (including large designs). > > The integrated Intel GPUs that are old enough to not have OpenGL 3.0 are > no longer supported by Intel (everything since HD2000 series has it, as far > as I know) > > -Jon > > On Fri, May 10, 2019, at 12:33 PM, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote: > > Hi, > > I've been recently playing with Victor's huge 32-layer PCB design and > trying to improve the performance of pcbnew for larger designs. This > board causes even pretty decent PCs to crash/render glitches due to > pcbnew's enormous VBO (Vertex Buffer) memory consumption. > > It turns out it's caused by the way KiCad renders filled zones: > - the inside of a zone is drawn/plotted as a filled polygon with 0-width > boundary. This one not a problem - we already triangulate the polygons > and I recently developed a patch for the OpenGL GAL that allows reusing > vertices of triangulated polys in the VBO/Index buffer to further reduce > memory footprint. > - the thick outline is drawn with rounded segments with the width = > minimum width of the polygon. Since we don't have arcs in polygons, each > of round features (e.g. vias) surrounded by a zone gets a ton of tiny > segments in the polygon outline. Each rounded segment in OpenGL is > composed of 2 triangles, hence 6 vertices (that can't be reused...). For > Victor's board it means 1 GB (sic!) of the VBO goes for outlines of the > polygons alone. Disabling the outline drawing makes the renderer work > smooth again. > > I've been experimenting with some ways to fix this: > - generating the thick outline strokes using a Geometry Shader (which > means bumping up GL 3.0+), which means farewell to many Linux/older > integrated Graphics users. > - caching a triangulated polygon which is a boolean sum of the filled > inside and the thick stroked outline. This takes a lot of time (~2 > minutes for Victor's design) to load and still takes quite a bit of VBO > memory. Another downside is that the polygons are not fully WYSIWYG > (outline segments have true rounded corners, while the corners of the > displayed shape would be approximated with line segments). > - change the way KiCad handles filled zones to calculate the (stroke + > inside) boolean sum during zone filling process. It means changes to the > plotting/GAL/3D code, but no changes to the file format. We'll also be > forced to inform the users that they have to refill the zones if they > read a file generated by an older KiCad version. > > > Which solution would you prefer? > Cheers, > Tom > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp >
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