Topic: Hardware - CPU?

[palmy100]

Hi,

I know that Lumion uses the power of the GPU to really work well but what is the minimum spec CPU? At the moment I have a Dual Core 1.8Mhz machine with 2Gb RAM and on board graphics. I'm about to invest in a reasonable graphics card which I've read about elsewhere on the forum but will my current spec of PC be usable for projects. I'd like to start with Lumion free and hopefully buy a standard licence.

Also this machine is XP - I'll up the RAM to 4Gb (I realise the 3Gb XP limit). Will it be able to cope with reasonable size models. What sort of polygon count should I expect. I'm looking at an Nvidia GTX670 2Gb card. Is it worth putting Windows 7 on?

Thanks

[BMcIsaac]

There is a very big difference in win7 over xp. If you have it you should run it. I would take a guess that a 4 gig box plus a good card will do a fine job. I have never seen anyone from Lumion describe the minimum requirement for CPU

Although it should work Lumion will stress it out....There is a lot of I/O going on all the time and you will find that your box may overheat. You will need to make sure  it has a power supply that is sufficient for the new card.

Good Luck and have fun with it!!

[Morten]

Hi palmy100, the most important factors are the graphics card, the Windows version and the system memory (in that order).

The CPU is not used much - it's mainly for compressing frames after they have been rendered.

The 32-bit version of Windows is unable to allocate more than 3.5gb ram to each application, regardless of how much system memory you have. For that reason, it is highly recommended that you use Windows 64-bit (Windows 7 is really worth the upgrade by the way). 4gb of system ram is on the low side, but it really depends on what kind of scenes you're planning on making.

If you do decide to upgrade to a GTX 670 card, make sure that you get a decent power supply. If it is unable to supply enough power you will experience unexpected behaviour such as warped polygons, crashes etc.