Unity Going Forward

[Barry Warsaw]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:21 AM, Jason Warner 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.

There's another important environment that Unity 2D supported: VMs which lack
OpenGL support.  An example of this is VMware Fusion on OS X which, until
recently did not support Unity 3D.  I believe it still does not *officially*
support OpenGL on non-Windows guests.

Unofficially though, at least with 12.10 (and I think 12.04), Fusion 4.1 does
support OpenGL sufficiently to allow you to run Unity 3D.  Go to the
Settings->Display page and enable Accelerate 3D Graphics (shut down your VM
first).

I've been running 12.10 this way since early pre-alphas and it seems to work
fairly well, with minimal glitches.  The most noticeable for me is that Emacs
repaints rather slowly from top to bottom on some full refreshes.  I don't see
this on native hardware.

Other than a few other weird little issues that show up only on Unity 3D[*],
I've been generally happy about it lately on a variety of real and virtual
hardware.

Cheers,
-Barry

[*] LP: #751858  Emacs geometry is still messed up.
    LP: #1038087 Weird switcher bug affecting claws-mail