FocalPoint System Compatibility Tool
Developing new products from the ground up is both exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because you're inventing a new way to do something and Challenging because, sometimes, what you want to invent requires newer technology than might be previously and widely installed already out among your user base.
Such was the case with FocalPoint. There is a lot of heavy lifting going on behind the scenes math-wise with the different blurring algorithms and then blending them all together in a real-time manner. The result, I think, is a great user experience and that has been shown in several reviews of the product including a Hot Pick award by Photoshop User magazine. The downside is that not everybody has the hardware to run software like this.
In order to FocalPoint where we wanted it, we had to off load the majority of the work to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as that is a very fast and efficient way to do what we wanted. The problem is that there are a lot of computers out there, mostly Windows based, that don't have a graphics card capable of doing this math as quickly as necessary and therefore run FocalPoint.
For Mac users who own relatively newer computers made in the past couple of years, this isn't a problem as the graphics card supports the necessary calls we make. For Windows users with older systems or Windows users who purchased more of a bargain machine (I'm included in this group for my last Windows based PC), the graphics cards included in those machines just aren't all that great (there's a reason there is a huge market for add-on graphics cards for Windows gamers). If you've got a Windows desktop machine and you do any kind of graphics intensive work like photo editing, video editing, gaming, etc it is worth upgrading your video card. But if you have a laptop, that's a bit tougher and requires you to pretty much buy a new one, which is a tough one to deal with.
So the reason for all of that is to get to this...we have a tool that you can run on your Windows computer to see if your video graphics card meets our minimum requirements for running FocalPoint. Please, please, please run this app before you download a demo or buy FocalPoint to make sure your system can run it.
Download the FocalPoint System Compatibility Tool.
Step 1 is to download the tool (see above)
Step 2 is to unzip the file and once unzipped you will have an app called GLView.exe
Step 3 is to double click it to launch
The lower left hand side of the window is going to be a list called GL Extensions.
Verify if GL_ARB_fragment_shader and GL_ARB_shading_language_100 are present in the list. If they are not present then your video card does not have extended GL support and unfortunately, FocalPoint will not be able to run.