System Requirements for Running Circle Dock

[joz]

Hi all,

this is my first post here, just discovered circle dock and really like it!

But the reason I subscribed to this forum is that I think I have some issues, maybe machine specific.
CircleDock works fine on it's own no probs!
However when I launch MediaPortal and CircleDock's running in the background MediaPortal doesn't like it at all! It's stuttering all over the place.
Dunno if this is an issue that's probable because of two apps running on dotNET?
If you need me to provide any more info. feel free to contact me in anyway (here, or by e-mail)

Btw. just read through some of these posts and saw a newer alpha release then I'm currently running (the one from the homepage; 7.6) I'll try that and report back when I can.

Edit:
Should have started my own thread, maybe someone could move it to some better location...

[VideoInPicture]

Hello,
I don't think there is any software conflicts between Circle Dock and other programs but I think that running Circle Dock in conjunction with other graphics heavy programs may result in a system slowdown if the graphics card can't handle it. Alpha 9 (to be released in mid-October) will address some of the performance issues but I'm not quite sure about what I can do for the minimum graphics card requirements yet. I haven't explored if it is possible for Circle Dock to use hardware acceleration or what needs to be done to lower the graphics card requirements.

As a side note, Circle Dock is currently hard coded to use the highest quality graphics it can generate from the image files it uses so maybe I could add an option to lower the graphics quality like Rocket Dock does.

It would be interesting to know your system specs and what graphics card you would have so I will know in the future what the minimum requirements are.

Eric Wong

[joz]

Thx for the quick reply.

Well my system specs aren't that bad Here goes;

Software
Windows XP SP3 x86 latest updates + .Net 3.5, silverlight and all the other bla
ATi Catalyst drivers 8.8
MediaPortal 1.0 RC2 + latest svn weekly build
This is a quite fresh install (no more then a week old)

Hardware
CPU: E6750 @ 3,2GHz
RAM: 4GB OCZ @ 950MHz 5-5-5-18 T2
GFX: ATi HD3870 512MB
MoBo: Gigabyte P35-DS4 rev 1.0
PSU: Enermax 620w
Sound: Creative X-Fi xTreme Music
TV-card: Hauppauge PVR-150

Probably more than you need but at least I could be specific

P.s.

Just discovered that this specific issue is also skin speciifc with MediaPortal, so there's probably not much you can do here. The Aeon Wide Mediaportal skin, which I'm using, is kind of a hack anyways...

[VideoInPicture]

Looks like you have a good system there. We will have to see what magic I can pull of in Alpha 9. It will become multi-threaded and I'll brush up on .Net graphics optimzation.