What is the optimal hardware and software combination for running VisIt?
VisIt should perform well on just about any Linux or Windows system as long as you follow these guidelines: • You should have at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of memory for your system. The actual amount of memory you will need depends on the size of the dataset you will be visualizing, but having plenty of memory will ensure that you don’t suffer large performance degradations. • You should make sure that you install the graphics driver provided by the vendor of your graphics card so that you can get full hardware-accelerated graphics rendering. The standard Linux distributions come with a generic driver that will work on all systems, but this will not give top performance. If you plan to use Linux and have not yet purchased a graphics card, you should check that the card you are considering purchasing has a driver optimized for Linux. • If you run VisIt on Windows, you must use Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7.
