So, with the final-final-really-final honest-it’s-true-at-last Blender 2.8 to launch over the release-horizon in July 2019, I decided to test the 2.8 near-final beta on Windows 8.1 64-bit.
I was looking forward to at least getting a glimpse of the new “complete 2D animation toolset” Grease Pencil module, with 3D interfacing and complete with a dedicated UI workspace template. I don’t care about the animation, but I was interested in comics stills production and how fiddly it might be compared with the ease-of-use with Poser. I was also curious about the Eevee matcap feature, though apparently the Eevee toon shaders are not yet implemented. The simple Sculpting UI workspace template also looked worth a brief try.
But, sadly, the current Blender 2.8 beta crashes my Windows display driver every time it starts to load. Then it refuses to load anything, and just sits there as a blank bare window and loads no UI elements.
Oh well, I guess my system is no longer powerful enough to run Blender. Probably because the… “minimum graphics card requirements for Blender have increased to OpenGL core 3.3.” And the new plugins, such as Toonkit for Cycles 1.3, will only run with Blender 2.8. As I can’t afford a shiny new £500 graphics card + a new PSU to power the new Blender, it looks like Blender is not for me. Despite being free, Blender has now made itself very expensive, both in terms of time-to-learn and its hardware baseline.