by Graf Zahl » Fri Mar 30, 2018 12:49 am
I already noticed yesterday that the numbers were starting to change, with a lot more 32 bit binaries being downloaded.
And checking the database today confirmed that by seeing that the number of OpenGL 2 users was increasing far stronger than the rest. It looks like now the Brutal Doom users start to catch up and they seem to run on low end hardware to far bigger proportions than the early downloaders.
As for the rest, not much has changed. Software rendering is still at 10%, Windows XP is insignficant (21 reports from 17 users out of 2347 reporting , one of which is clearly bogus) and still no signs of ancient pre OpenGL2 / Shader model 2 hardware being used at all.
At the low end of supported hardware things are more interesting:
We are still at 0 users using Shader Model 1.4 hardware and 15 users reporting software rendered 2D. Of these 15 users, 9 also report use of the hardware renderer so they can be assumed to have at least semi-modern hardware. Of the remaining 6 users, 5 are on Linux which gives a high probability of being stuck on a system that cannot do hardware accelerated 2D due to the minimum requirement of OpenGL 3, but could if that backend was fixed to run on GL 2 - and only one user on Windows.
So it takes no rocket science that with such low numbers and the feature being one major roadblock, its days are numbered, this will easily be one thing that can be removed without worrying too much, so that the entire 2D code can be cleaned up and consolidated. There's currently 4 different backends here, each with different features and limitations, which makes it very hard to work on it.