Re: [Kicad-developers] Was the initial graphics mode screen removed?
Le 12/01/2022 à 13:32, Franck Bourdonnec a écrit :
well, my second laptop is a an old e525 acer that is more than enough
rapid to do 'internet/video/kicad/kicad debuging...' even with 2~3
hours for a full build.
Having it unable to run KiCad , very disapointing ;)
Funny enough (so to speak...), my main laptop mainboard just crashed and
I'm currently back to a 2007 Hewlett-Packard laptop (15 years old!)
running Linux.
The Nvidia GPU driver is not supported anymore by the latest X11
(AFAIK, they dropped the DirectX9 programming interface. Have to use
Nouveau driver + DRI / OpenGL2.1).
.
Surprisingly, I can run Freecad almost flawlessly (on not too
complicated designs), but Eeschema is stunningly slow (for example,
serious lag when moving components onscreen).
A positive note : a slow machine help put some parts of the code
efficiency under the magnifying glass !!
Don't partitipate to "obsolescence programmée" ("programmed trashing
?") ?
-> AFAIK, This is "Planned Obsolescence".
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Re: [Kicad-developers] Was the initial graphics mode screen removed?
Le 11/01/2022 à 22:57, Tomasz Wlostowski a écrit : There's a LOT of room for improvement just by using more modern GPU features (and by modern I mean from 2012). 2012 : what a travel in time ! Tomasz, thanks for the explanations. BTW, I only worked on the schematics, this summer (for some private assessment of a few schematics features or UI improvements), that's why my remark was so inaccurate. Pierre. ___ 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
Re: [Kicad-developers] Was the initial graphics mode screen removed?
Le 11/01/2022 à 21:59, Jon Evans a écrit : The current offerings (e.g. bgfx) are generally multi-platform but without the software fallback option. OK, got it. I just had a look at bgfx, seems neat. BTW, the |bgfx|::|||Init()| fuction seems to accept a |BGFX_PCI_ID_SOFTWARE_RASTERIZER| parameter, may be the trick (or not...) Now, I totally agree that there is no point to develop/support a private, updated, fallback rendering engine from scratch in the future. Yes, OpenGL will likely remain supported on systems other than Windows/Mac for now at least, but we at some point will have to decide if we want to bump our minimum OpenGL version to something higher than 2.1. Do you intend to support an new backend on MacOS and Windows only, and keep the current OpenGL backend on Linux (can't see a good reason for this) ? If it were me, I wouldn't touch the current rendering code (i.e. like switching to OpenGL 4.x), and devote all the future effort toward the integration of the new graphics backend on all platforms. From my previous tests (Kicad 5.99), I can say that any speed bottleneck is likely NOT in the rendering engine, but in the rest of the code. I can't count how many Boost:: containers are scanned, and even temporarily created and deleted, when you play with the graphics elements in the schematics ! (The 3D viewer is a different matter). Pierre. ___ 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
Re: [Kicad-developers] Was the initial graphics mode screen removed?
Le 11/01/2022 à 21:10, Jon Evans a écrit : > IMHO, we shouldn't remove anything that helps to deal gracefully with the diversity of situations (like a virtual machine), graphics hardware and video drivers... and their possible bugs ! (as stated about X11/Mesa). [...] we need to push forward into more modern hardware-accelerated graphics APIs in order to make it possible to implement some desirable features, help performance on large designs, etc. The idea is that instead of being stuck on some "lowest common denominator" OpenGL, we can instead for example use DirectX on Windows and Metal on macOS. -Jon It would be nice, then, to choose a modern backend that supports natively multiple hardware engine, including a pure software rendering that could be used as "fallback". Slower, but may save the day to some. These third party graphics layers are usually multi platform/OS, and a software only rendering option is reasonable expectation, but I really don't know what is the current "offer", in 2021. Anyway, taking this into account from the beginning could make it happen with very little development overhead later. (BTW, OpenGL may well still be the hidden engine for Unix-like systems - just my guess). Pierre. ___ 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
Re: [Kicad-developers] Was the initial graphics mode screen removed?
Le 11/01/2022 à 19:25, Steven A. Falco a écrit : I don't think the dialog would help any in the situation you are describing with the artifacts on the screen. It was only shown on first start, so it wouldn't give the choice in future runs (which would be after you notice all the artifacts). You can change the rendering backend in the preferences pane though, so you can switch back to the fallback graphics that way. I'm describing two situations. One is the artifacts on my desktop, and one is the segfault on VMs. As long as the window opens and is somewhat usable, then one can select fallback graphics easily from preferences, as you said. The bigger problem is on the VMs where it crashes before the window gets a chance to even open. I'll look at the issue you linked and see if that helps. I'll also try a test build from the tip of the 6.0 branch and see how that behaves. I'm more concerned that fallback graphics might be removed entirely at some point. Hopefully accelerated mode will be bullet-proof before that decision is made. Steve Unless there is much work involved to keep both backends working in the future, I strongly feel that a fallback graphics engine is a must and should be kept alive, even if this requires some (moderate...) effort. IMHO, we shouldn't remove anything that helps to deal gracefully with the diversity of situations (like a virtual machine), graphics hardware and video drivers... and their possible bugs ! (as stated about X11/Mesa). @ Steven : About the possibility to choose a graphics backend, in any situation, and indeed before a segfault happens : What about a command line option (when launching Kicad), to force a specific graphics backend, including a "safe" fallback ? Should be quite straightforward. Cheers, pmx. ___ 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
