Tuning your PC for Earthsim
Earthsim is designed to show you high-resolution, accurately-lit space views in real time, and this makes demands on your 3D graphics hardware similar to those of the latest 3D games. In terms of image data processing, Earthsim exceeds the demands of most PC games available today. If you haven't updated your graphics drivers in the last 6 months, or set your AGP settings, you could be in for a pleasant surprise! It's not unusual to get a 2x performance increase, and much better image quality, by completing the two simple maintenance tasks outlined below.
Updating your graphics drivers
A "graphics driver" is a software program that runs on your PC that enables your graphics hardware, and allows you to configure your display. Graphics hardware manufacturers regularly release new versions of this software in order to improve graphics performance and quality, and to fix bugs. Updating your graphics driver to the latest version can make a big improvement to Earthsim and to any other 3D applications you use on your PC. To identify your graphics hardware and update your graphics driver, visit our Graphics Driver Download page.
Setting your AGP
A common type of graphics hardware in your PC is a "Graphics Adapter" or "Graphics Card" that plugs into the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) in your PC. When you identify your hardware it will probably mention "AGP" if you have an AGP card. If it says SiS, Intel or mentions "PCI Express", then it probably does not use AGP (in which case, please ignore this section). If you have an AGP card, or are unsure, it's a good idea to check your AGP settings. If you see no improvement after setting up the AGP, you can always set it back as it was before. For guidelines on how to set up your AGP, visit our AGP Tuning page.
More tweaks
There are many other ways to improve the performance of your PC, not only when running Earthsim but with other Windows applications too. If you want more information on tweaking your PC, take a look at http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/.