JavaFX and old PC with Windows XP

Question

I wonder if my standalone application that gui is being made using JavaFX 2.1 would run on a quite old computer with Windows XP, because this app is intended to work on that computer. I'm asking because I'm begginer to JavaFX and it seems like that technology has quite high requirments, last time I've got warning: "bad driver version detected, device disabled. Please update your driver to at least version 8.15.10.2302".

Answer 1

If your machine meets the minimum system hardware requirements and you have a recent graphics driver installed, then JavaFX 2.1 should work on your Windows XP machine.

Whether JavaFX will work on a machine depends on the hardware in the machine as well as the graphics driver installed.

Here are the JavaFX 2.1 system requirements.

The version string you reference would appear to be for an integrated Intel chipset graphics driver. You can download current versions of such drivers from Intel.

Update

If your system does not support hardware acceleration, then JavaFX uses the Java2D software pipeline" - just to be sure, my program will still work, but with poorer graphic, right?

At least in some cases with older drivers, it would seem that the app will work by falling back to a software pipeline. While this kind of fallback will work for a large percentage of older hardware and software combinations, I don't think it is fully tested given a wide variety of older hardware and driver combinations and I don't think there is a guarantee that the program will still run as expected.

The below outlines my experience with JavaFX 2.0 and 2.1.

If the graphics hardware is not listed in the JavaFX system requirements as being supported for hardware acceleration, then JavaFX will fall back to the software renderer and the app will work (albeit with potentially reduced performance and lack of access to some conditional features such as (perhaps) effects or 3D rendering). This scenario should be pretty uncommon as JavaFX supports a wide variety of hardware acceleration hardware.

If the graphics hardware is listed in the JavaFX system requirements as being supported for hardware acceleration and the drivers are up to date, then JavaFX will use the hardware renderer and your app will work. This is by far the most common scenario - any desktop purchased in the last few years should meet the minimum JavaFX hardware acceleration specifications and driver requirements.

If the graphics hardware is listed in the JavaFX system requirements as being supported for hardware acceleration and the drivers are not at a level required for JavaFX to function correctly, then the app may not work (the app may fallback to the software pipeline and continue running or you may get a message stating that the drivers need updating) or the app will just start experiencing rendering errors and possibly freezing or crashing. This scenario should only occur on a very low percentage of possible runtime targets.

If you have instances of hardware and driver combinations where JavaFX is not behaving as you would wish (i.e. not correctly executing your program, logging spurious exceptions or freezing and crashing), then file a jira issue with the hardware and software specifications to get the JavaFX team to look into providing support for that combination.