Unity/Cinnamon Software Renderer

The 2D Project is being discontinued since thanks to improvements in software rendering technology, ALL computers will be able to benefit from Unity and the same is true of Cinnamon. This is already being felt on the new GNOME 3.4 which no longer has a fall-back mode - any one can now use the GNOME Shell without being required to have an accelerated graphics PC to benefit from the new desktop environments that have emerged in the past year or two.

Thanks to Nick Rhodes for catching my error - I thought I posted a link to the Ubuntu site and I should have read it more carefully. Meanwhile, Phoronix has the story.

More details here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2MTQ

I expect Unity and Cinnamon will also be ported to Mac OSX Intel in the future.

 

That link is about Unity3D which is a games engine ?!?

 

No that would be llvmpipe - a new software rendering technology for the Unity 3D and Cinnamon UI which would allow users of low powered computers to run the same interface as users of computers with accelerated chips now do. It eliminates the costs of maintaining two different frameworks for Unity/Cinnamon.

That's what the above link discusses and Unity 3D is the Ubuntu shell on running on top of GNOME 3. It will become the default in Ubuntu 12.10 and as Mrkvonic will soon tell you, there's no longer a fallback mode for GNOME Shell when he gets around to reviewing SUSE 12.2.

 

Check again the link is for the site unity3d.com which is a games engine, I think you have put the wrong link up !

Cheers, Nick

 

Thanks... I thought that was Unity site by Ubuntu and I did put the wrong link up! I googled and still nothing official from Canonical but llvmpipe is already used in OpenSUSE to enable Cinnamon and it looks like the same will happen with Unity in the next Ubuntu release in the foreseeable future.

 

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2012-August/035632.html

 

Thanks for posting it! Very old computers might not be able to run a GL 2.0 engine but few people run original Pentiums. I run mine on a Via C-7 chip, it can handle llvmpipe. No one is expecting the kind of performance seen on an advanced chip PC, but the software renderer is more than adequate for the vast majority of computers currently in use.