OpendTect Hardware and OS requirements

Supported platforms

OpendTect runs on:

Intel/AMD under Linux (32 or 64 bits) or MS Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7 - 32 or 64 bits)
Mac/Intel under OS X (10.5) and up

Hardware requirements

Graphics:

OpendTect requires a recent well-patched OpenGL installation. OpenGL drivers should be updated at least every half year to ensure optimal performance and compliance.

Intel/AMD: Recent nVidia and AMD (ATI) graphics cards/chipsets. Well behaved are nVidia GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series and AMD (ATI) Radeon X1xx and X2xx series.
Mac:Similar to the Intel/AMD platform.

Main stream and high-end GPUs within the series are recommended, since low-level GPUs keep showing poor performances through the generations.
Since OpendTect 3.0, shading functionaly requires special GPU features, present in the cards listed above. Nevertheless, under Linux, only nVidia provides drivers capable of using the shading feature. If you can't see any colors on graphic elements, try disabling shading (Utilities-Look and Feel).

Memory

OpendTect should at least have 1 GB internal (RAM) memory available. Depending on the size of the surveys we recommend 4-8 GB on average. In special cases (big surveys or many data cubes) more memory may be required.
A rule of thumb is to have at least 10 times the displayed number of samples available. Thus, to be able to display 10 inlines with 2000 crosslines and 1000 samples per trace, you'll need a minimum of 200 million bytes of memory (i.e. 200 MB).

Processor

For Linux and MS Windows, a modern Intel or AMD processor is required. Although OpendTect will run on 2 GHz processors or even less, we recommend 3 GHz dual core for a good working environment.

Operating systems

Linux

A modern Linux distribution is required. Minimum:

SuSE 10.0
Red Hat Enterprise 3 (32 bits) and 4 (64 bits)

For both SuSE and Red Hat-based distributions 32 or 64 bits releases are available. OpendTect is known to work under Debian, Ubuntu and other distributions, as well as earlier versions of the main distributions, too. Fedora usage is not recommended - although it may work it's the only distro that regularly fails to work in combination with OpendTect. This is probably because the graphics vendors do not support it well in terms of drivers.

Mac OS X

Minimum is Mac OS X (10.5) - thus Mac/Intel. Mac/PowerPC support is not available in 3.2 or higher. A 3-button mouse is highly recomended.

MS Windows

Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 are supported and both 32 and 64 bits releases are available.

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