Re: Minimum system requirements for GNOME Shell

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Fri, 2010-12-24 at 16:57 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:

> * Minimum OGL requirements to launch clutter

these are written down in every announcement I send for any Clutter
release, and in the README file of Clutter:

  • OpenGL ≥ 1.2 + multi-texturing *or* OpenGL ≥ 1.3

anything else (shaders, FBOs, VBOs, etc.) is based on feature
negotiation with the underlying platform, and Clutter tries to provide
fallback wherever possible.

> * Minimum Intel/ATI/nvidia chipset models with which a smooth
> experience is guaranteed

any intel integrated graphics card ≥ i915/945 (i.e. basically every card
shipped in a netbook, except the GMA500). the 915 architecture was
released nearly 5 years ago. the 8xx GPU series (and you can barely call
them that) are not supported.

> * Minimum CPU configuration for software rendering mode under swrast
> and llvmpipe (useful for VMs)

no, that's not useful *at* *all*.

VMs should do a passthrough to the host GL implementation. if they
can't, swrast is not going to cut it in any case.

> In addition to letting people know where they stand in all this, it
> would also help *us* make sure that GNOME Shell is usable (60+fps with
> no background processes, ~30fps with heavy background CPU usage) on
> the systems that we target. If testing is currently being done only on
> developer machines, we should begin to do testing on the minimum
> hardware configuration that we intend to support.

60+fps or 30 fps are utterly meaningless numbers.

the only number you really want to use is the vsync of your monitor:
anything more and you're just wasting power and resources.

also, you *really* don't want sustained updates: it's a user shell, not
quake.

if you want comparisons, you should be looking at how compiz and kwin
perform on the same architecture, and see if mutter/gnome-shell are
lagging behind. there is no reason why they should, and we recently
tested mutter with its default clutter-based compositor plugin and
verified that it beats (or performs as well as) compiz on the same
machine with intel GPU.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi