Unity Going Forward

[Jason Warner]

Hi Colin -

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 17 August 2012 01:51, Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com> wrote:
> > ...
> > But there is a cost to this decision. Unity 2D fit a very specific use
> case
> > in very low-end and non-GPU accelerated hardware. By consolidating to
> Unity
> > using LLVMpipe for this specific use case we expect to see some
> regressions
> > in systems supported. This means that a certain class of hardware will no
> > longer be supported to run Unity. Unity will run on all GPUs that support
> > OpenGL 2.0. The earliest GPUs that meet this requirement are at least 5
> > years old[1]. Even so, we know some subset of cards and hardware that
> could
> > previously run Unity 2D will no longer be able to run Unity.
>
> A heads up to make sure that the case of dual monitors with i945
> graphics chipset (and possibly others) has been considered.  That
> chipset will only run 3d if the virtual desktop is less than 2048
> pixels wide so when an external monitor is plugged in only unity-2d
> will run at the moment.  If the external monitor is not plugged in
> then 3d is ok.  Having removed unity-2d the software will have to cope
> with plugging in the external monitor in some way.  Note that this is
> an issue for laptops made only a few years ago (Toshiba Satellite for
> example).
>

Is there an bug for this? if not, please file one so we can track it.
Thanks.


>
> >
> > For these cases, we are actively working on Unity running through
> LLVMpipe
> > which is a work in progress. Unity through LLVMpipe is CPU bound which
> means
> > systems with decently modern CPU architectures and non-GPU accelerated
> > hardware should be able to run Unity. As I mentioned, this approach is a
> > work in progress as we tweak the experience and effects to maximize the
> > performance. We expect this to shake out over the rest of this cycle and
> > bleed into 13.04 as well[2][3].
>
> Is it correct that at the moment a machine that will not run 2d will
> not run at all after todays update?  This seems to be the case for me
> at the moment, I see no unity shell on screen and in .xsession-errors
> I see
> compiz (unityshell) - Error: OpenGL 1.4+ not supported
>
> When can I expect llvmpipe to start working so I know whether to log bugs?
>

The rought ETA is sometime just after FF, so adding some time for testing
and shakeout, it might be closer to beta1.


>
> Colin Law
>
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