We have been looking at hardware specifications for use with Pointools (and probably Descartes SS4) processing large LiDAR surveys of buildings, but appropriate (as opposed to minimum) hardware specifications seem to be thin on the ground.
The best I can find is that i7 or equivalent, 8GB of RAM, 512MB AMD or nVidia cards are 'recommended', but I have to admit that what hardware features Pointools will take advantage of seem rather opaque. I gather that the current version of Pointools is 32-bit (when is 64-bit out?), but would investing in more CPU cores and beefier GPGPU's be worthwhile? Is OpenCL a safe bet for the near future, or is there a chance of being stuck with CUDA (i.e. nVidia cards only)?
The same as above goes for Descartes. A broad outline on what hardware 'next-gen' MicroStation might benefit from would be welcome also, of course ;-)
Hi David,
For Bentley Descartes SELECTSeries 4 I would say more a bit more than 4 Gb of RAM and a fast hard drive.
Since Bentley Descartes SELECTSeries 4 is a 32 bits application there is no need to go much over the 4 Gb of RAM since even a huge amount of RAM on your computer a 32 bit application can only use 4 Gb maximum. 8 or 12 should ensure that there is at least 4 free for Descartes.
Also considering that Bentley Descartes has been designed to work with huge amount of data (raster, dtm and point cloud) that doesn't fit in memory a fast hard drive seems a sound choice.
Finally considering that most of the code in Descartes SELECTSeries 4 can only be run using a single thread at a time no need to buy a computer with a lot of cores.
As for the video card there is no need to buy something top notch since Descartes is not currently using GPU for code optimization.
Thanks,
Mathieu
Hi Mathieu,
Thanks for that. Is there a contact we can inquire the same of regarding Pointools?
cheers
Maybe you could try to send a PM to Dan Cutler (communities.bentley.com/.../default.aspx)?
He knows a lot about Pointools and often answer here on BE Communities.
HTH,
Matthieu... would a SSD instead of a hard drive speed things up?
Hi Dominic,
Well as far as I know SSD seems faster than HDD, yes probably.
But by how much is another question! My feeling is that it might not be worth it to pay the extra buck for a SSD over an HDD just to have some kind of speed-up.