kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[José Ignacio <jose.cyborg@xxxxxxxxx>]

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 <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
>
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