Q: Does ProFX support "3D" procedural texture maps?
A: ProFX procedural maps are not "3D" or "volumetric" procedurals (yet). This means you do have to UV-map around curved objects (for now), just like you do with traditional texture maps.

Q: So ProFX will turn my texture maps into procedural texture maps?
A: ProFX isn't a codec that magically turns regular textures into procedural textures. You will have to redesign the textures from within MaPZone2.
That said, Allegorithmic is that magic codec. You can send your photo references or hand-drawn textures to the advanced neural net named Gilles Fleury (or one of his staff) at Allegorithmic to do this. You simply email your textures/references to him along with a considerable wad of cash (see pricing), he fires up the powerful MapZone2 tool, and you get procedural maps in your email box the next day. We don't recommend doing this for the entire project, but this can be a good way to get a jump-start on productivity.

Q: How hard is it to integrate ProFX into my engine?
A: ProFX has been integrated into the UE3 and Gamebryo runtime and tools. We will give you a patch and help you get it running. You can also integrate it standalone. If you're integrating it into a new engine, it's really, really easy. You can think of it just like a jpeg library. In goes a jpg file, out goes a generated surface.
Same idea. In goes a pfx file, out goes a generated surface. You can set the processor and GPU affinities for the processing resources you want to allocate, and you can also feed it a surface to use as an input to the ProFX compositing system, in order to get some really cool filtering effects.

Q: How expensive is it to generate the texture maps?
A: Very! Loading or downloading a ProFX texture takes no time at all, but generating them requires a lot of processing and memory. If you're not using it as part of an install tool to get it on a local hard drive as regular DXT textures, but instead at run-time, then the most efficient way to generate ProFX textures is at level load time. While your GPU and processor are busy generating the ProFX textures and compressing them to DXT, you can still use the disks to load audio, animations, and other major sources of data.

Q: Don't the raw, generated textures take up more memory than DXT textures?
A: No. Allegorithmic incorporated its own high-speed DXT compression system, so that as you're generating the textures, you're also compressing them so that they use less texture memory.

Q: How fast is the ProFX runtime?
A: This is a complex answer, because ProFX uses a lot of optimizations that reduces the cost of each ProFX texture more the more textures you generate in a single batch. To get a rough idea of how long it takes to generate textures, using both the GPU and all CPU cores of the Xbox360, the "Tesla" level in RoboBlitz averaged a generation rate of 20Mb/sec. You could fill up 512Mb of textures at that speed in about 20 seconds. Due in equal parts to both the incredible horsepower of the Xbox360 and the impressive optimizations in the ProFX renderer, this is faster than the transfer speed of most console storage devices, and of course there are no disk seek penalties.

Q: Will this work with my streaming game?
A: Yes, but at the expense of memory. For the sake of speed, the ProFX runtime caches the FX Maps that are shared between textures. These FX Maps remain uncompressed while cached, and that costs memory.

Q: Is there a way to see how fast a ProFX texture will be generated?
A: You can get an idea of the relative speed using MapZone2, but note that it uses only a single CPU core to generate the texture. You can get a much better idea by testing out your ProFX texture either on your PC's GPU or on the Xbox360 with a utility to quickly test the generation speed. Note that when you merge your textures as described in the ExportingTextures page you have options to test the generation time on Xbox360 and PC's GPU.