Roon 1.7 taps some previously unused OpenGL 3.0 features to enhance Roon’s text and color rendering, and to increase the performance of Roon’s UI engine across all of our supported platforms.
OpenGL 3.0 was originally released in 2008, and has always been a minimum requirement to run Roon. While Mac users should be unaffected, we recently became aware that on Windows it was possible to run Roon with unsupported versions of OpenGL, which was causing instability when combined with the changes in 1.7.
Roon now checks to ensure our OpenGL requirements are met, but our desktop requirements have not changed. We know some desktop systems which do not meet our requirements were able to run Roon in the past, and we are investigating whether that might be possible in the future. For now our recommendation is to use desktop devices that include support for OpenGL 3.0.
As we take advantage of these capabilities, it’s important our mobile apps aren’t left behind, so our requirements on mobile have changed in this release in order to access equivalent functionality on iOS and Android. Starting in Roon 1.7, all mobile devices must support OpenGL ES 3.0.
All supported iOS devices already include OpenGL ES 3.0 support, as do the vast majority of Android devices. Unfortunately, some older Android devices do not meet these new requirements and, in some rare cases, extremely inexpensive recent devices don’t either.
For example, the 2017 model of the Amazon Fire 7 does not meet our new requirements, even though all of Amazon’s 2014 tablets do, as do all of their current tablets.
The graphical changes in Roon 1.7 have delivered significant benefits to our customers, with major improvements to Roon’s ability to accurately render text and represent colors, and these changes will continue to improve Roon’s performance in future releases.
We don’t take changes to our minimum requirements lightly, and we appreciate everyone’s understanding as we continue to improve Roon.