There's a really wide range of hardware in use by the devs and the game supports a wide range of settings to handle it all. If you have a super powerful desktop machine then you can crank the graphics, shaders, HDR and terrain right up. At the other end of the spectrum we have people running it on single core CPUs with fixed function graphics cards (pre-shaders).

Best thing is just to give it a go and then ask on here if you're having any particular issues 🙂

Andy

Thanks for writing back! I am a computer tech so of course I only have old/crappy systems at home. The reason I am asking is because I plan on building a spacecraft simulator for my son. I was just going to build it with lights and switches and whatnot, but now that I have found pioneer I want to make it fully functional. I need to find a decent system to run the game though. I'll start testing soon. 🙂

best.dad.ever! 😀

That sounds like an awesome plan.

A quick run down for the best performance so far would be that Pioneer supports multicore but only really takes advantage of dual-core machine and nothing more so far (except in an experimental branch). A modern GPU will let you use the HDR and shader support but it doesn't actually need to be a very good GPU, just low to mid range should be good enough for Pioneer.

So a dual-core, low/mid-end GPU and maybe 2GiB ram would be plenty. Something like the new AMD or Intel chips.

Maybe see if someone else has tried running it on one of them but I imagine that's quite close to my laptop spec' (except the ram) and it run pretty good on here.

See what everyone else thinks now and give it a go on your older machines to see how it fairs.

Andy

PS: welcome to the forum!

Thanks for the info Andy! I am going to look into joystick support also. I can always go with a cheap joystick but I am curious if a flight yoke would work also.

A flight yoke might look different to you, but to the computer it looks exactly the same.

I have one of the AMD A6 ones in a laptop, it also has a secondary graphics card though. That runs Pioneer very well indeed.

😀 Thats really cool, we were just discussing this on IRC, you could go pretty crazy with controls and buttons if you felt that way inclined. Using PPJoy and GlovePie, you can write some simple scripts that will let you emulate any kind of control surface you need.

So for example you buy your cheapo joysticks/gamepads, take them apart and move the buttons into better positions on your 'cockpit' then using that software you can make those buttons emulate any other action, be it keyboard, mouse or joystick.

But if your going to this much effort, you should certainly buy a decent joystick for the main flight controls. 🙂

Good luck!

Thanks s2odan! As far as a joystick goes, I'm worried about kids wrecking it. This will be more of a toy than an actual simulator. It will take a beating I am sure.

Expensive joysticks are often more robust than cheap ones. The very cheapest ones aren't worth their cost, IME.

Ooh which AMD A6? Am currently hardware shopping for something low to mid range for someone else.

Its an A6-3410MX APU(Sabine), its got a Radeon HD 6520G as well as some other Radeon card. Not sure which one is the integrated card and which is pci.

But the great thing about it is the undervolt/overclock potential.

Mine is 1.6 ghz quadcore, with turbo core/boost to 2.3ghz (which runs it dual core), I switched up the multipliers and profiles so that it now runs at 2.4ghz 0.075V lower than it did at 1.6ghz and has a turbo core/boost of 3.0ghz just in case 😉

I wanted it at 2.4 since thats the clock speed of my desktop and I wanted a comparable experience hehe 😉

I would recommend it 🙂