As one of the system architects at Multimorphic, and the primary system architect at Valley-Dynamo, Spooky, Circus Maximus Games and primary OS guy at American Pinball, we all have slightly different requirements depending on the game implementation.
The P3 is by far the most advanced in terms of the rendering engine and resource demand. We're powering up to three monitors, two of which run at 1080p. The games are doing full real-time 3D rendering and compositing to make the scene you see on the playfield/backbox.
Houdini has a higher resource demand than some of the others due to the sheer number of graphical assets the game has, but those are on a 2D plane.
TNA and Alice Cooper all run 2D, but we use the video acceleration hardware wherever possible to render frames and cut the CPU usage down. We HAVE to use these technologies in order to cut the compute BoM down, plus they just look better to the player. AC/NC is still very early though, and uses a slightly beefier system than TNA, but the OS components are mostly the same.
Valley-Dynamo has a much lower resource demand when designing their new air hockey tables. Similar to Multimorphic/Spooky, their hardware control takes place on a dedicated hardware system, so the compute demand is fairly low for their stuff.
Circus Maximus doesn't have a high CPU demand yet on Kingpin, mostly since the compute system right now is being used to run the M68k emulation for the Capcom system. That demand will increase as development on the custom HD code continues.
As with all of 86Pixels' clients, we maintain upgradeability between all of the core OS components between companies pretty much on-demand.
Anaheim, CA
