Poll: what if Unity dropped support for ancient GPUs? (2013 version)

News & General Discussion
1

Back in 2011 I asked a very similar question. Let me ask that again in 2013!

Sometimes at Unity we’re thinking “we should drop support for some old GPUs, it’s a pain to keep support for them”. Specifically, I’m thinking about GPUs that are more than 10 years old.

What if: Unity would drop support for pre-DX9 level GPUs (NVIDIA before 2003, AMD before 2002, Intel before 2004)? These are about 3% of the marked based on our current stats.

I’m wondering how many game developers actually test their games on these ancient GPUs. Even if Unity does support them in theory, the games you folks make might be quite unplayable on them, unless you really try hard to get them working there. So if experience for players is quite bad anyway, maybe better to just display a message with “sorry, get a GPU from this millenium” instead?

2

If its a massive pain to continue supporting them then you may aswell drop it. You don’t buy a super nintendo to play halo 4 :wink: The earliest model i’ve tested my projects on would have to be 2005. I wouldn’t say 10+ year old GPU dont deserve games though.

3

It really depends on the amount of work on your end, if it is easy to keep supporting them then why not?
EDIT:
Oh I just read DX9, yes I would get rid of pre DX9 cards.

4

Supporting >10 year old GPUs does cost a lot of time and frustration, and sometimes prevents us from adding new fancier stuff.

5

Yes if it is holding back Unity then get rid of them ASAP.

6

"prevents us from adding new fancier stuff. "
Keep in mind, this is the stuff, people really want new fancier stuff

7

Yes, but only if you do display a big pop-up message saying “Get a GPU from this millennium, dude” when there gpu is not supported :wink:

8

Pre-DX9? Holy crap, I didn’t know you had archaeologists employed to even find specs for them :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Can any GPU that old even run the graphical side of unity?

10

I happen to be a big proponent of that very sort of stuff

11

Currently, yes. Well of course it can’t do much, e.g. you won’t have deferred rendering, shadows, postprocessing etc. on a DX7 GPU, but some simple VertexLit stuff would work.

12

drop it. it will help the hardware industry :smile:

13

If it can’t do much then why can’t you add the new features and just make them not work on old hardware?

14

This is what we’ve been doing so far, but it gets challenging really fast.

15

IMHO support “anything with pixel shader 2.0 and up”. If you drop support for cards at mobile-level performance on the grounds of performance then maybe drop mobile too eh? :wink:

3% of how many people? if 3% turns out to be a million and your customers are doing web games its a risky move.

I hope you’re not thinking of dropping support for vertex lit because many still will use that for pure speed, even on big games. Maybe especially on?

16

What about all those Apple Machines? IIRC Unity uses OpenGL on those machines. And IIRC, Apple hasn’t updated it’s OpenGL port since quite some years?

Wouldn’t dropping support for Pre-DX9 cards also have an influence on Apple machines?

17

I’m talking about pre-DX9-level GPU technology, no matter if DX or GL is used.

Mac is actually affected much less. From the stats, 0.1% of the Mac users have pre-DX9 level GPU (and all of them are “apple software renderer” for reasons I don’t know). The OS itself does not support pre-DX9 GPUs starting with OS X 10.6.

18

Is it possible to show numbers instead of percentages? I mean 1 million people representing 0.1% would be too good :wink:

19

No way, I don’t want new fancier stuff. What’s wrong with you!?

On a more relevant note…I wouldn’t care if you dropped support for cards that old. Doubt the majority would.

20

…

okay get rid of those old graphic card…