2. System Requirements and Triangle Count

2.1. System Requirments

SPIERSview has no minimum requirements as such, and will run simple models on most systems. Performance will benefit from high processor speed, a large amount of system RAM, and a fast graphics card with a large amount of onboard RAM.

Linux: [tba]

Windows: Windows 7 or higher is recommended, and a 64-bit version of the operating system is required. SPIERSview has been tested on Windows 10.

Mac OSX: This version of SPIERSview does not yet support Mac OS. Please see www.spiers-software.org to download v2.14 which is supported. SPIERS v2.14 requires: OSX 10.5 or higher is required. SPIERSview makes use of the right mouse-button; on single-button Mac OSX systems use the control-click combination to simulate right-clicking.

2.2. Triangle Count

SPIERSview measures the complexity of models in thousands of triangles (KTr). At the time of writing, typical workstation systems with 4Gb of RAM can comfortably cope with models of up to 25-30,000 KTr, while basic laptop systems may struggle with models of over 3,000 KTr. Difficulty with a model can manifest itself as either slow responses (a slow frame rate, see bottom left of status bar – anything less than 5 frames per second is slow), or crashing. Approaches to the reduction of triangle count in SPIERSedit exports include avoiding ‘speckly’ data (see SPIERSedit manual), the use of restricted numbers of slices, and the use of downsampling or ‘binning’. SPIERSview itself can simplify models using one of two ‘fidelity reduction’ algorithms (see below); using these it may be possible to use a powerful system to convert a difficult model to a lower triangle count model that can be handled by lower-powered systems.