About System Requirements

Article by Rob Church, Popshotz Photo Booth

Processors are the brain of the computer, they handle all the instructions to and from all the other components (user inputs, video streams, running programs etc..) and keep it in good running order. RAM is super fast “running program” storage space, having enough open RAM keeps your computer from bogging down when programs need a ton of available code and processes “on the fly”…not to be confused with your hard drive, which saves all your permanent data but with much slower access speeds.

Sparkbooth performance, video frames per second (FPS) along with video resolution, is based on having enough system RAM and having a processor that can handle the running code along with controlling the video stream.

RAM is the easy part, it’s just a number, buy a little more than you need and you’re good.
Processors are very tricky and that’s mostly where I wanted to go with this article. There are thousands of different processors out there from a basically two different manufacturers (Intel, AMD) over many generations plus desktop and mobile versions and there is no easy way to look at the letter and number combinations to know what is best for your application, so what should we do?

Benchmarks, that’s where the power is shown and the weaknesses exposed. There are many websites and applications that run CPU benchmarks, I would recommend www.cpubenchmark.com. That site is usually in the first few results that turns up if you Google a processor by its proper name (i.e. Intel i3 2130, AMD Phenom II 1055t, Intel Atom n270) this site will provide the information we need without too much extra information.
You can either Google the name of the processor, or go to the website and use the search box in the upper right corner.

The number we need to determine if your processor will work, are right below the red ones in the picture shown below. Sparkbooth is a single threaded program that will only run on one core. If you can have an 8 core processor that is very efficient, but has very weak single core processing.

So what is a good number? Personally, I have found that single core scores above 1400 work well for Sparkbooth 4.x Premium running everything at its maximum with 8GB of RAM and a Logitech C910/920 webcam.

For Sparkbooth DSLR you will need a little more horsepower, I would recommend a processor with a single core score over 1700 and at least 8GB of RAM.