What are the System requirements for Grasshopper ?

Hi,

I was just wondering if there were any minimum system/hardware requirements for computers in order to run grasshopper.

I've had trouble in the past with the computer freezing, when lots of connections have been made on screen with grasshopper. I'm looking to get a new computer but i want to make sure that its powerful enough to run the program.

Any suggestions?

many thanks, Sonya

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 6, 2009 at 7:07am

In order to run Grasshopper all you need is Rhino4 (or higher) and the DotNET Framework 2.0 (or higher).

If you want to get a faster computer, just get a faster computer. The default rules apply:

1) Get plenty of RAM. Windows 32-bit can assign 2MB of Ram per process, so if you have lots of RAM, you can run Rhino+Grasshopper in memory all the way. I'd say get at least 4GB, and preferably 8GB. If you have a 64-bit machine, then it pays off to go even higher than that.

2) Get fast RAM. Memory access is the main bottleneck in many applications, so the faster the RAM the faster most apps will work.

3) Get a fast processor, rather than lots of slow processors. Only a few apps out there can truly use Multi-Threading (Rhino and Grasshopper cannot). These days, CPU manufacturers try and dress up multi-core CPUs as the next best thing. It is not. It is a lie. Until software can truly run on multiple cores there is no benefit to this. If rendering is a big part of your job, then it does pay off to have a multi-core machine though.

4) Get a good graphics card. I've always preferred NVidia over ATI, but there are many good ATI cards as well. You can go for a gaming card (they're cheaper), but note that these are optimised for drawing triangles. If you get a professional card, it will draw lines and curves much faster.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Robert McNeel & Associates

Permalink Reply by Peter Mehrtens on December 4, 2009 at 9:19am

question to 4) graphics performance:

does gh preview mostly mesh triangles out of the geometry?
what about the surface (brep) /polysurface preview?

There are two nice looking fair priced cards out there at the moment: - Geforce GTX 285 and Radeon HD 5870. Has someone used those with Rhino V4 or V5?

Permalink Reply by Joris Bourgeois on September 11, 2010 at 5:18am

Hello David,

About the graphics card: I'm thinking of getting a new one, but would you recommend a more low budget NVIDIA Workstation Quadro card (sometinge like: PNY Quadro FX 580 or PNY Quadro NVS 290) over a NVIDIA Geforce GTS or GTX card?
Since most Workstation cards are super expensive, I'm thinking of getting either a cheaper workstation Card or a better Gaming card.

Thanks for your advice!

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