onox wrote in Sat Sep 13, 2014 11:35 am:Has any dev tried to disable their nvidia card and use their built-in intel GPU for once?
I recently built fg on a dual-core netbook with Intel GMA graphics (1gb RAM) to see if/how well Canvas is supported there (some people reported white RTTs due to lack of FBO support) - it is true that doing this more regularly would probably help identify certain issues much earlier - I do think that a few contributors try to spin up FG once in a while on their old computers - Thorsten repeatedly mentioned doing that for regression testing purposes when testing his own work. But I do agree that FG would be in a better shape if had some way to do this more often, possibly automatically on some kind of headless build/regression testing server - which kinda is what a few people have been working towards:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_Headlesshttp://wiki.flightgear.org/TestingThings like the recently discovered listener issue in the effects subsystem or massive memory leaks would stand less of a chance of going unnoticed if we had more people testing FG on old hardware - but it's a chicken/egg problem because you need to be pretty familiar with FG to make it work at all, so most people don't bother - and as a coder you tend to prefer writing code over testing obviously, so given the lack of feedback, FG is leaning more towards power users with the latest GPUs and 1+ gb of VRAM unfortunately - simply because that's where all the testing manpower typically is.
People wanting to change that, need to roll up their sleeves and get involved, and provide feedback.
all testing on, and development for, such systems would benefit FG in the long term, because hardware support/compatibility would increase over time - which would also make it possible to target other architectures, i.e. gaming hardware, Rasberry Pi and so on:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Optimi ... le_devicesThe whole FGCanvas thing (FG with most subsystems disabled) does work even on hardware as old as 7 years:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/FGCanvas