I agree that this Intel driver situation stinks, and there are other technology decisions we could have made that might have let a 4.5 year old graphics chip work a bit better. But it is noteworthy that this is the second disastrous chip by Intel, the first was the Sandy Bridge HD 3000.
[quote=“Mark_Sherman, post:4, topic:16711”]
Sorry, but all of my other applications run perfectly[/quote]
This Intel driver is notoriously bad on WIndows. Here is an example of it failing on EXCEL. Yes, Microsoft Excel is screwing up on the Intel Driver: https://communities.intel.com/thread/20966
Roon pushes quite a bit of textures to the GPU – this pushes the Intel Driver pretty hard and causing it to mess up. We’ve seen this over and over with certain drivers, and not with others.
Unsure what other apps you are running, but Photoshop and Lightroom are also known to screw up on Windows with the Intel HD 3000 and 4000, both which push the GPU.
Most our team are actually Android fans, and the most popular phone we use is the Nexus 6p. Besides a problem with a unreleased developer preview build of Android 7.1.1, there have been no problems there. Also, even though we have worked around some of the issues on 7.1.1, it looks like many other developers are having issues with 7.1.1’s changes in the area of screen sizing. I hope they fix this for the planned release (maybe this week?), but it doesn’t look hopeful.
It sucks that you ran into 2 issues, one with old hardware and one with too new of software.
We are a self-boostrapped startup formed by a team that split out of Meridian, with no ownership, share, or influence by Meridian. Before Meridian, our exact team that created Sooloos, that Meridian acquired back in Dec 2008.
I think you meant to write Sooloos, and not Sonos, as we have nothing to do with Sonos. However, we ARE the Sooloos team. I personally invented the name Sooloos back in the late 1990s and it was my personal project that Enno took to market. The rest of the Roon team (minus a few new hires) that you see here worked on the Sooloos project post launch, and built Sooloos 2.x while at Meridian.
Sooloos was Direct3D based, meaning it only ran on Windows (the Control ran XP Embedded), which worked fine on that hardware, but it also used quite a few UI tricks that are no longer acceptable in 2016 (no smooth scrolling anywhere).
As for OpenGL – it’s the only performant option available across Android/iOS/MacOS/Windows.
HTML would fall over, especially on a machine with 4+ year old gear. We know this, because we did this experiment. The browser just doesn’t scale on memory consumption or performance when it comes to long lived applications that are graphically heavy. It’s getting better daily, but not for an app like Roon.
Most of Roon was developed on the Intel HD 4000 on a MacBookPro Retina (early 2013), as it was the machine of choice for 2 major developers. MacOS’s graphics drivers are known to be slower and more limited that the Windows equivalents, but they also doesn’t fail like the Windows drivers by Intel on these older chips. However, this chip CAN work. The Mac driver clearly demonstrates that. Note that the exact same OpenGL code runs on Windows and Mac, so it’s a great A/B test where the driver is the only relevant difference.
Agreed, but there is only so much we can do here… the real question is do we spend time finding workarounds for half-decade-old GPUs and their buggy drivers or work on future features? Please don’t be upset with us, it is Intel that has forsaken you. We have tens of thousands of members, and only a few handfuls of people have run into this chipset’s issues. It’s unfortunate, but we have to look forward, not backward, especially when some of those people did driver changes and got things working.
As for your Android 7.1.1 issue on the Nexus 6p, we addressed it pretty quickly, because we could – just awaiting release right now. This Intel issue has been plaguing us for years. It’s one of the reasons we offer a trial. This issue usually comes up pretty quickly if the machine with this configuration is your primary Roon machine.
We said Ivy Bridge+ in our hardware requirements back when we launched in early 2015. Although we do run on the earlier Sandy Bridge, it is unbearable due to these types of issues (there is another CPU pipeline / RAM bottlenecking issue with Sandy Bridge). Ivy Bridge is starting to feel that way now. @mike, maybe time to update that to Broadwell?