What I meant was Blender is very bad at degrading gracefully to work fairly well with older OpenGL versions. As soon as your stuff is just a tad older than Blender supports, that’s it. You’re left out in the cold.
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I’m stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
Any higher version and Blender simply pukes out a message saying that my GPU doesn’t have the features it requires. Or I have to degrade to software GL, which is not acceptable.
Blender has always been like that. The Blender developers assume their audience is mostly professionals with endless resources to throw at their software project, and they just don’t give a rat’s ass about making their stuff usable for people with older hardware.
Not to minimize your plight there, but that sounds like a fairly uncommon situation. The last version of OpenGL 3 was released in 2010, which was 16 years ago, so if you have a recent card that’s unable to use a version newer than that, then your driver is strictly to blame, not Blender (If Blender supports OpenGL 4.0, which was also released in 2010, that would mean it still supports 16 year old cards, such as a Geforce GTX 460, which would be pretty spectacular support and backwards compatibility. IMHO, the opposite if expecting users to constantly upgrade).
May I ask what card you have that suffers from this issue?
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I’m stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
What I meant was Blender is very bad at degrading gracefully to work fairly well with older OpenGL versions. As soon as your stuff is just a tad older than Blender supports, that’s it. You’re left out in the cold.
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I’m stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
Any higher version and Blender simply pukes out a message saying that my GPU doesn’t have the features it requires. Or I have to degrade to software GL, which is not acceptable.
Blender has always been like that. The Blender developers assume their audience is mostly professionals with endless resources to throw at their software project, and they just don’t give a rat’s ass about making their stuff usable for people with older hardware.
Not to minimize your plight there, but that sounds like a fairly uncommon situation. The last version of OpenGL 3 was released in 2010, which was 16 years ago, so if you have a recent card that’s unable to use a version newer than that, then your driver is strictly to blame, not Blender (If Blender supports OpenGL 4.0, which was also released in 2010, that would mean it still supports 16 year old cards, such as a Geforce GTX 460, which would be pretty spectacular support and backwards compatibility. IMHO, the opposite if expecting users to constantly upgrade).
May I ask what card you have that suffers from this issue?
You said it yourself, that’s a card problem