Hi,

I see discussion about OpenGL driver issues on OS X on another thread it it got me thinking, I recall there were environment variables that allows one to override or hint to Houdini to lower the OpenGL requirement, something along the line of H11 compatibility and/or software OpenGL (if one is on Windows)

With H14, is OpenGL 3.3 a hard requirement even if we are fine with foregoing some features whilst testing or troubleshooting and using it at e.g. the previous minimum of OpenGL 2.1 ?

Cheers

GL 3.3 is a firm requirement. Several aspects of the viewport would have to be entirely rewritten, often with more effort than the GL3 path it is replacing, if GL2 was used. Others (like deforming crowd agents) wouldn't be possible at all.

We previously had the GL2 renderer specifically for OSX, but it proved too difficult to maintain alongside GL3 and didn't guarantee simple or stable codepaths either. There is nothing overtly complex about GL3, most of it is pretty standard stuff. The GLSL compilers are usually the weak link as every vendor writes their own, and GL2 relies on those as well.

Major OpenGL versions might as well be different APIs - there are very fundamental differences in the way you design for them. In fact, it'd be far easier to support GL3 and DirectX 10 than GL3 and GL2, as the former has near feature parity.

Apple has definitely taken the hard route, implementing the front-end GL interface to a half dozen back-ends developed by various vendors. It took Nvidia, AMD and Intel years to develop proper GL drivers for their own hardware - and Apple's developed a common front end to interface with all of them. Must be insanely complicated. IMHO, anyway