Minimum requirements to deploy FireMonkey on Windows

Question

What are the minimum requirements for a Windows machine to run an application developed in FireMonkey? Can it run any machine that can run a VCL applications? Specifically

Answer 1

As a supplement to the other answers, some other things to consider:

• If you are making significant use of controls like TLabel, TEdit and TMemo, be warned that on Windows XP, FMX will use GDI+ and not draw text very well.

• Even when FMX uses Direct2D to draw controls be warned that the quality of text rendering in particular may vary between hardware. I'm not saying you are likely to have issues... just that it's possible. E.g. on one machine I get text that is drawn overly 'sharpened' to my eyes... though that may not be problematic for others. The point is that you can't just assume the old GDI's level of consistency when rendering text (the GDI - not GDI+, or for that matter Direct2D - being what the VCL uses).

• Different parts of FMX have different requirements. In particular, it's the 3D part that requires Pixel Shader 2.0. While this requirement isn't particularly problematic on a non-virtualised desktop (an old netbook won't work... but then you may not have expected it to), it can be in a virtualised environment, e.g. if you're using VirtualBox.

That said, these issues are all Windows-specific - the other platform FMX supports where it also has system requirements to take a note of is Android, but there the issues are completely different.