Some of you may remember that I've been beta testing a dance visuals program for a while now, and now the developer would like a broader range of test computers to pull results from. Or more specifically, laptops. The program is called
Visikord, and it uses an Xbox Kinect or Asus Xtion Pro Live sensor (can also use a good video camera with some extra physical setup) to pick up a person's motions to activate different elements on the screen. Essentially letting you make your own music visualizations.
The program itself is officially released and there is a free home version if you just really want to explore it. For the purposes of the testing we're looking at, we're trying to find what a good minimum computer spec would be to run the program smoothly. If you don't have a Kinect or Xtion sensor handy (Or if you got the non-USB Kinect bundled with the new Xbox 360 design and don't have the adaptor for A/C power and USB connection), don't worry. You can download the Demo/TEST from
THIS PAGE, and it will install a pre-recorded 70 second clip of the program in action. What it does is play back the motions of the dancer, letting your computer still do the rendering as if you were really running the program. All you do is run the test program and it will take care of the rest, as well as show you the frame rates in the upper left corner of the screen. Even if you do have a sensor to use, please only report official results from running the specific TEST demo.
Anyone is free to test this, but keep in mind, we're looking for low to mid level laptop users with a dedicated graphics card. Right now, the listed system requirements are:
■Windows 7/Vista/XP, 32 or 64bit
■Dual-core CPU or better
■Dedicated graphics card (NVidia/ATI) highly recommended
If you want to do this, download, install, and run the test program (Will also install some drivers I think from Prime Sense, which allows your computer to recognize the Kinect sensor). Keep an eye on the frame rates and make note of what they do. I.E. minimum and maximum FPS, average FPS, any spikes or dips, etc. You don't need to be able to give exact numbers since this doesn't benchmark those and I know it'll be hard to catch that kind of info. Just a general idea of what it's doing and how smooth the rendering appears for you. Then send that, along with your system info to me on here or in a PM if you wish so I can forward the info on to the developer. Obviously no personal information would be shared. An example of what I'm looking for would be like on my machine:
OS: Win XP 32 bit w/SP3
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHz
GPU: Nvidia 8800M GTX 512 MB
Ram: 4GB (3.25 seen) DDR2 @ 800 MHz
HDD: 200GB @ 7200 RPM
Resoloution: 1900 X 1200
Max FPS: 58
Min FPS: 54
Average: About 55-56
No major fluxuations (this may vary for you if a certain scene requires more processing power for you)
Not required, but if you want to go the extra step, there's a program called GPU-Z you can find online for free that will monitor your graphics card usage for things like memory use and GPU loads. Feel free to add that info as well.
I have run this test on a computer without a dedicated graphics card and it played a lot slower. If you do the same but your frame rates remain above 45, I'd be interested in that as well, because that's about the minimum you can get away with for overall smooth performance. There will also be a performance hit if you run this while using multiple monitors, so let me know if you're running a multi-monitor setup. That info would also be useful since the developer will be incorporating multi-monitor support in a future release I think.
Thanks to any and all that try this out.
