Blender Eyes Raising Its CPU Requirements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Blender Eyes Raising Its CPU Requirements

Hot off the release of Blender 3.4, Blender developers have begun discussing the possibility of raising their CPU requirements moving forward for making use of this open-source 3D modeling software...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-Eyes-Raising-CPUs

[microcode]

Presumably this is just changing the build parameters for the official builds, then maybe later dropping pre-SSE4 codepaths; but for people getting Blender from a distro repository, presumably it will not matter for a while.

[Turbine]

Jeez, no GPU driver support for gpus in those rigs.

[milkylainen]

AVX is almost 15 years old.
Why would you want to run a not-yet-conceived-version of Blender on something that's older than 15 years?
Masochistic tendencies?

[ssokolow]

AVX is almost 15 years old.
Why would you want to run a not-yet-conceived-version of Blender on something that's older than 15 years?
Masochistic tendencies?

When the chip shortage hit, I was still on an Athlon II X2 270 because it's a pre-PSP AMD CPU in a pre-UEFI motherboard and I don't have air conditioning (it's a 65W TDP part, unlike the used Opterons people would suggest).

Now, I'm trying to stretch it out until the projected opening of new chip fabs in 2024 or 2025 while most of my tight budget goes to more/bigger hard drives.

[ms178]

AVX is almost 15 years old.
Why would you want to run a not-yet-conceived-version of Blender on something that's older than 15 years?
Masochistic tendencies?

Found one! Every time when this discussion pops up, all of a sudden people with museum pieces turn up and raise their voice. I think it is safe to assume that a performance-sensitive project like Blender raises its CPU minimum requirements from time to time if it makes sense for a majority of their users.

Update: Hehe, ssokolow, I think it was you. No offense, mate.

[ssokolow]

Found one! Every time when this discussion pops up, all of a sudden people with museum pieces turn up and raise their voice. I think it is safe to assume that a performance-sensitive project like Blender raises its CPU minimum requirements from time to time if it makes sense for a majority of their users.

Update: Hehe, ssokolow, I think it was you. No offense, mate.

*chuckle* Yeah, and I was more raising it as a "You pointed to AMD releasing SSE4a in 2007 but, by my 2011Q2 CPU, they still hadn't added SSE4.1. It's possible there are still AMD CPUs blocking SSE 4.1 for a little longer under your 'Quad core and less than 10 years old' requirement."

Thus leading with "Those dates are misleading."

[sobrus]

While Blender devs consider SSE4.1 to be perfectly viable option for this software, everybody are discussing raising requirements to at least AVX2 for cat, ls, less, echo and other such stuff. And compile them with -O3 --fast-math. To have directories shown faster.

[tildearrow]

While Blender devs consider SSE4.1 to be perfectly viable option for this software, everybody are discussing raising requirements to at least AVX2 for cat, ls, less, echo and other such stuff. And compile them with -O3 --fast-math. To have directories shown faster.

AVX is a good target. AVX2, not so much. There are fairly recent processors without AVX2.

[TemplarGR]

When the chip shortage hit, I was still on an Athlon II X2 270 because it's a pre-PSP AMD CPU in a pre-UEFI motherboard and I don't have air conditioning (it's a 65W TDP part, unlike the used Opterons people would suggest).

Now, I'm trying to stretch it out until the projected opening of new chip fabs in 2024 or 2025 while most of my tight budget goes to more/bigger hard drives.

If you do not have money to purchase even a modern budget cpu on the cheaper end of the scale, it is obvious you don't really need to use Blender. If you actually have the skill to make use of it, you most likely have a decent income as a professional. If not, you are doing something wrong.

And if for some niche reason you really, really, really need to use a modern 3D modeling application on an extremely old budget cpu, you can still use the current version of Blender just fine. It can still be compiled, it can still work. It is still available for download. There is no need to stall progress just because of those niche use cases.

It is tiring to have the same arguments again and again and again. People with old hardware should be using old software. Old software doesn't disappear just because newer software gets released, it is still there, it is still usable.