On 11/14/2011 11:29 AM, Whitney_Roessler@Dell.com wrote:
Chimera Team,
One of my customers at IUPUI will be utilizing the Chimera software and is looking to purchase a 3-D capable system. I was wondering if you could provide to me the minimum or recommended hardware requirements to run this software.
Thanks,
*Whitney Roessler*-*Account Manager*
*Major Public Accounts ESL *
*PH:*512-513-9351/ *Toll Free* 877-671-3355,*ext* 5139351
*PO Fax:*512-283-7082 *Email:* whitney_roessler@dell.com <mailto:whitney_roessler@dell.com>
The answer to your question depends on how much data the customer wishes to view at one time, whether or not they wish to view their data in stereo, and whether or not they wish to make large animations. Look at the Chimera Benchmarks web page, http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks, for some idea of the relative capabilities of various systems. You'll notice that there are very few benchmark results for current systems, so perhaps you could run the benchmarks on various Dell configurations and submit the results, that way other people could get an idea of what to buy. Personally, I prefer a workstation with a high end 3D graphics card, but a gaming system might be more than adequate. Stay away from older Intel motherboard graphics, 2D graphics cards, and entry level 3D graphics cards. And only get a laptop where the graphics driver can be updated with the GPU vendor's driver (Dell and all other laptop vendors are very bad at updating the graphics drivers on their support sites and lots of Chimera bugs have been solved by updating the graphics driver). Hope this helps and feel free to ask more questions, Greg