Computer System and Setup Recommendations? (case 2912)

[Trevor Newell]

[edited from support email]

Hello. I am looking for a new laptop computer that I can use to collect data with DirectRT. Can you tell me the minimum specs I need for the computer? How much RAM, chip processing speed, etc?

[Trevor Newell]

Just about any new laptop will have the ability to run DirectRT without a problem. There are however a few upgrades that can definitely help out the performance of your computer and application.

When running DirectRT, it is recommended that you have a dedicated graphics card. This should be the most important factor in a laptop that you purchase. Although smaller laptops such as the ASUS Eee net-book PC have the power to run DirectRT, they can occasionally slow down.

With that in mind, just about any laptop that -isn't- a net-book should blaze through the software. The following specs would be more than enough for DirectRT:

Display - 800 x 600, 256 colors (Minimum); 1024 x 768 high color, 32-bit (Recommended)
Memory - 1 GB (Minimum); 2 GB (Recommended) -- Memory is cheap these days, so I recommend getting as much as you can. 32 Bit OS's can't take more than 3 gigs of RAM.
Processor - 1 GHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Minimum); 2 GHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Recommended) You shouldn't need a multi-core processor. Just make sure you aren't running too many programs at once during testing.
Graphics Card - 32 MB's (Minimum); 256 MB's (Recommended).

The above setup will have no problems running even the 2010 release of DirectRT.

[lpadams]

I'm in the process of setting up a laboratory and I am trying to decide which type of laptop to purchase. I know that the graphics card is perhaps the most important consideration when selecting computers to run DirectRT (as you've stated above, 128 MB's Minimum; 256 MB's Recommended). Do these recommendations refer to a dedicated or shared/dynamic graphics cards?

Would a laptop using a shared/dynamic graphics card be capable of running Direct RT?

[Trevor Newell]

The recommendations refer to dedicated memory; however shared/dynamic memory can tend to work just as well. Dedicated memory will always be faster as the card itself can manage all the memory that is used when running an application like DirectRT. Shared/dynamic memory will be slightly slower and may impact performance.

Also - I've lowered the minimum specs. down to 32 MB's of memory. 128 MB's would be -far- more than needed (not that there's anything wrong with that).

To answer your question -
Yes; a laptop using shared/dynamic memory would be capable of running Direct RT.

[hwhitty]

Hi,

I noticed the above recommendations were for running DirectRT--what are the minimum recommended specifications if I were to use MediaLab? I need to buy a another laptop for my study and I don't have a lot of money to spend on a laptop, so I want to make sure I have "just" what I need to run MediaLab smoothly.

Thanks.

[jarvis]

The basic requirements are about the same for MediaLab. Almost any machine you can purchase now is going to have sufficient resources to run most MediaLab and DirectRT experiments. With DirectRT, our only strong recommendation is to get a nice dedicated graphics system (with its own dedicated memory) that is not simply a chip on the mother board. Also, when Windows Vista and Windows 7 came around we seemed to get reports of problems with a number of Dell Optiplex systems, and also with some machines using Radeon graphics cards. When people are having display trouble and I ask people about their hardware, in many cases, I hear "Dell Optiplex, Radeon HD graphics card". But then again, Version 2012 seems to be working nicely with even these systems now. We are always working on hardware compatibility--let us know if you run into any issues.