GL 4.3 as minimal version most likely means that they are using compute shaders. The GL 4.3 standard is 13 years old though, so it's not exactly bleeding edge any more ;)
AFAIK the entire Blender UI (not just 3D preview) runs on top OpenGL.
I don't know if compute shaders were the reason for the GL 4.3 requirement, but from own experience, having to support different GL versions in the same code base isn't exactly trivial without resulting in a granular #ifdef-mess.
The cleanest solution is to have different backends for different GL versions, but that means a lot of duplicate maintenance effort and code.
But tbh, any cheap laptop made in the last decade should be able to run GL 4.3.
The only exceptions I've seen so far are VMs and the Raspberry Pi.
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Blender is the 1st software (not a game) I'm dealing with, which refuses to start with OpenGL 3.3 available. Nowadays Blender requires 4.3 [1].
2 GB [1].
[1] https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/
GL 4.3 as minimal version most likely means that they are using compute shaders. The GL 4.3 standard is 13 years old though, so it's not exactly bleeding edge any more ;)
I've been thinking Blender uses OpenGL only for previews not for the actual rendering. Could not compute shaders be optionally enabled?
The OpenGL 3.x hardware itself is capable of OpenCL 1.x including CL/GL interop.
AFAIK the entire Blender UI (not just 3D preview) runs on top OpenGL.
I don't know if compute shaders were the reason for the GL 4.3 requirement, but from own experience, having to support different GL versions in the same code base isn't exactly trivial without resulting in a granular #ifdef-mess.
The cleanest solution is to have different backends for different GL versions, but that means a lot of duplicate maintenance effort and code.
But tbh, any cheap laptop made in the last decade should be able to run GL 4.3.
The only exceptions I've seen so far are VMs and the Raspberry Pi.