[No] Running GLES renderer via ANGLE

[Rachael]

It was never my intent to induce any inconvenience for working on multiple backends and I always knew that any support for non-Vulkan renderers would be removed eventually, anyhow. This was something that's been stated very early on, ever since the Vulkan renderer was first introduced, and even before that. So please don't mistake my interest in them as a requirement to keep them. The latest survey makes it clear that the number of people who actually need this support is very very small.

I actually do not have any interest in potato related PC's, my only interest in the GLES backend is "wow, this is cool, I can't believe this is still GZDoom".

For what it's worth, the potato backends (softpoly/GLES) are an inconvenience for mod authors, as well, since they cannot run the more modern features of GZDoom - particularly custom shaders. Also for what it's worth - phones and tablets these days are being introduced with Vulkan support right out of the box. Vulkan is the future. Even the Android port of GZDoom I suspect, will be moving forward with that as well, as time goes on. While Vulkan on these devices might not nearly be as fast as it would be on desktop devices, it's still a lot faster than the real "potatoes" that a small percentage of people are running, and will only get better as time goes on anyhow.

So yeah - I am interested in GZDoom moving forward, as well.

[Enjay]

I have to admit that the attitude of "I want to keep my really old hardware, but I want to run the latest software on it" has confused me for a long time. With old hardware, sooner or later, you are just not going to be able to run the new versions of any software, be it GZDoom, the operating system or whatever.

So, equally, if you won't or can't update your hardware for whatever reason (and I'm not trying to suggest that the reason's aren't good ones) then there has to come a point of acceptance where you acknowledge "my computer was never intended to run that kind of software because the hardware required wasn't even thought of when my machine was new". The conclusion, surely, has to be "I'll run the old version of the software, because it works fine on my machine" and (specifically to GZDoom) "I guess I can't run mods that require new features because my hardware isn't up to it".

I genuinely don't understand why this is a debate, or why people with the older hardware expect anything else. I have several older computers lying around, I wouldn't expect any of them to run the current GZDoom well. Most of them have GZDoom on them though - and the version that they have works just fine on them.

I also feel that it is particularly important to recognise (as discussion in this thread and the survey has shown) that the people who really can't run what is being regarded as the newest features (and many are not really bleeding edge, next gen features, but something quite well established in general gaming circles already) are running very old machines (older than some of our younger users!) and are a tiny, tiny proportion of the people using GZDoom. Why should the devs have a harder life, and the vast majority of the users have a compromised experience for such a tiny percentage of users? If you can't update your machine, I have sympathy (really, I do) but the version of GZDoom that runs best on your machine already exists and isn't going to vanish - it just won't be the newer versions.


In other news, I tried to fill my internal combustion engine car with electricity last night but it just didn't run. Surely the fuel manufacturers need to come up with a way of me using electricity in my old car without me having to change anything about my car?

[Graf Zahl]

In other news, I tried to fill my internal combustion engine car with electricity last night but it just didn't run. Surely the fuel manufacturers need to come up with a way of me using electricity in my old car without me having to change anything about my car?

Yeah, something like that.And then you hear them talk about GZDoom being 'unoptimized' because it does not run well on 15 year old hardware...