Proof Animation Hardware/Software Guidelines
Hardware - General Information
P5 and P3D were designed to take advantage of modern hardware features. If you try to run them on old hardware, the results may be disappointing.
The following features are highly desirable for systems on which Proof is run:
Video hardware should employ the PCI-Express bus interface, with as high a multiplier as possible, e.g., PCI-Express X16.
The more video memory, the better. New video hardware should include a minimum of 512MB of video memory.
For P3D, Video hardware should support Microsoft's Shader Model 3 or higher. P3D is able to exploit Shader Model 3 to process large numbers of instances of a class of objects. For example, if you're animating the movement of 5,000 aircraft, Shader Model 3 allows P3D to specify the geometry of an airplane once and transmit compact lists of location, rotation, and scale for large batches of airplanes. Shader Model 2 and below force P3D to transmit both the entire geometry and location, rotation, and scale information to the video hardware for each airplane.
CPUs on which Proof is run should include the SSE2 instruction set, which was introduced by Intel in 2001 and AMD in 2003. P3D requires the SSE2 instruction set.
On dual-core CPU's, P5 and P3D are able to run on both cores simultaneously. For example, if an air traffic animation tracks the simultaneous progress of 4,000 aircraft, the computations of aircraft position and rendering of aircraft images to the screen are done 2,000 per CPU core.
Using P5 on "Older" Hardware
To cope with older hardware, P5 offers three modes of operation. If your hardware has difficulty running P5, try clicking on Setup, and selecting Video Method B or C. (Video Method A is the default and should work best on most hardware.)
Two aspects of hardware performance heavily influence how well P5 performs on any given machine. First, the hardware must provide fast access to memory shared by the CPU and video hardware (so-called AGP memory). Second, the hardware must be able to quickly copy screen images from AGP memory to the screen. Most high-performance 3D graphics hardware satisfies these requirements.
Software Requirements
P5 and P3D are built on Direct3D (tm), a component of Microsoft's DirectX (tm). P5 and P3D require Release 9.0C of DirectX or higher. This version of DirectX was released in August, 2004. Wolverine Software does not distribute DirectX, since most machines already have it installed, and including it with our installation procedures would add considerable size to software downloads.
If you do not have DirectX 9.0C, you can download the DirectX End-User Run-Time from Microsoft's website. The easiest way to get to the download site is to search the web form "DirectX 9.0C".
P5 and P3D also use DirectX libraries that are updated by Microsoft several times a year, but are not readily available for end-user downloading. Wolverine Software includes these extensions to DirectX in its downloads and software installation procedures.