kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 01:30:44PM -0600, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> At what point is is cheaper to buy the KiCad user a new computer, than it is to write
> software for his incompatible computer?

Well, toughbooks are not exactly cheap even on the used market :D
I don't know where you live but here machines about 5-10 years old are
pretty normal; at least try to support the 5 year old ones:D
(beside: incompatibility of new PCs with win3.1 software IS an issue...
we have a lot of virtualboxes running for this)

Even these days Intel/Tungsten GPUs are everywhere on the middle/low end
laptop segment, so I think it's not a good idea to say 'will only works
on ATI or NVIDIA'. Also many open drivers are not exactly up to speed
with the latest hardware.

So if it is not really unconvenient to develop for, I'd stick with the
low-end of the graphics API.

As for Intel GPUs wikipedia confirms that opengl 2 is only from the
960/965 on. Previous GPU seems to do only pixel shading (and only with
1.4 extensions).

Question: do we really need gl2 for kicad? I can't think of something
useful which couldn't be done with the usual fixed function pipeline.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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