The roadmap says that support for OpenGL 2.1 will be removed in this version.
However, I am still seeing a significant speed reduction under OpenGLCore (with 5.3.1p1) - about 25%. Is it still planned to remove this renderer?
The intent is still there, but it has not been removed as of yet.
Have you submitted a bug report I can make sure they look at? They probably need to be sure of platform, hardware, etc. The tricky part is in improving and unifying some of the OpenGL code, shared code can sneakily break performance of other platforms. Our overall test rigs aren’t covering enough which is why thing slipped through, but its something in our immediate attention to fix.
(In fact, there was at least one case of a perf fix, creating a new perf regression on another platform or two. It’s tricky!)
Yeah the intent is to remove legacy GL iff everything is fine with the new GLCore backend. Right now it still seems to have performance regressions in some cases, so by all means file bug reports with them. If we’ll manage to fix all the issues within a ~month or so of 5.3.x releases, then we’ll consider removing legacy GL for reals. If not, then we’ll keep it until GLCore is good enough.
I’d say if you still have regression, even if you manage to fix them give them some time before really removing them. I doubt the beta testers can give a full scenario and it will be people complaining all over again that it’s not working.
Why not do one version where 2.1 is disabled by default and when you enable it, it will warn that it is being phased out in the next version?
Something like 5.4 with 2.1 disabled( but still in the build) and 5.5 removed if there are no more bug reports.
This way everybody will switch and you will have many more test cases for sure to work on.
Removing some feature based on few beta testers is waiting for trouble to happen.