[Qgis-user] Qgis minimum hardware requirements

Nicolas Cadieux nicolas.cadieux at archeotec.ca
Tue Mar 12 13:30:00 PDT 2019 

  * Hi again,
  *

  * If I was shopping for a laptop, this would be my personal feelings
    about this (excluding the fact that I would never again, buy a
    Laptop for GIS!).  If your not shopping for a new laptop, get more
    memory and a SSD drive if you think your laptop is slow.
  *

  * 1) Speed of CPU and how many cores.
  * CPU speed is not really a problem anymore.  Having more cores is
    better.  An i7 normally has more core than the I5...  AMD will also
    put more cores but they are individually slower than Intel's.  I
    would aim for at least 4 real physical cores (so 8 in total). 
    Currently, screen rendering is done in threads but not much more.  A
    new OpenCL option is there (but I can't get it to work on Windows). 
    This will be worked out soon I imagine and I think more and more
    algorithms will start using it.  OpenCL can run on CPUs but will
    shine on video cards (GPU)

2) How much disk space is needed for installation.
-About 5GB

3) Size of Hard Disk and swap space.

-The biggest SSD you can buy.  I would take a laptop that has a m.2 slot 
based on PCIe (and not based on a m.2 SATA slot).  If not, a regular 
SATA SSD drive would be next and hybrid drives the last option.  Patrick 
has a good point on SSDs.  Having the possibility to use an Intel Optane 
m.2 drive could be nice if you have a free m.2 PCIe slot and a SATA 
based SSD.

  *


  * 4) Minimum RAM memory.
  * -I would get 16GB now with condition I can upgrade to 32 or 64GB for
    future proofing.
  *

  * 5) Display and screen resolution and lastly.
  * All displays will probably work.  My 10 year old laptop has 1366 x
    768 and this works. That would probably only come with a lower end
    laptop today. You can most likely get a 1920x1080 or better.  Make
    sure you have a digital or usb-c (with video) plug to be able to use
    a second or third bigger screen.

6) Graphics memory.

I have only recently needed to update an nvidia GTX260 in my rig.  That 
had only 896MB of memory and it only gave me trouble with LiDAR clouds 
(not in QGIS). The video card choice will depend on your budget.  I you 
had a very big budget, professional laptops for CAD will come with pro 
card like Radeon Pro, or nvidia Quadro. An alternative would be to look 
at Gaming laptops.  Video cards are geared towards gaming but will come 
with more dedicated memory.  Then, I would look at AMD based laptops 
with Ryzen mobile processors with Vega Graphics, then a computer with a 
dedicated nvidia card and on the bottom of the pile, an Intel processor 
with integrated Intel graphics and shared memory or and Intel with a 
integrated Vega (rumored). (Current affordable desktop video cards come 
with 6 to 8GB of memory)  4GB is probably good in a laptop.  The reality 
is that the graphic card will probably only become really handy when 
OpenCL will become used more in QGIS.  Since CUDA (NVIDIA) development 
does not seem in the cards, and ATI-AMD would probably be a better 
choice as AMD support the latest version of OpenCL but not nvidia.  For 
all those reasons, (and with a hand on my wallet), my gut reaction would 
be to look at the Ryzen-Vega combos first.  Others will disagree (and 
please do).

That's my gut feeling for now.

Nicolas


On 2019-03-12 12:32 p.m., Patrick Dunford wrote:
>
> It will depend very much on the size and content of your projects. 
> Vector layers are very efficient in resource usage. If you happen to 
> use raster layers, the software dedicates a lot of resources to 
> caching them, so that is where insufficient memory or swap may become 
> an issue.
>
> If you do work with large projects, adding a 100 GB or larger SSD 
> purely for swap purposes is a lot cheaper than 32 GB of system RAM and 
> not a great deal slower.
>
> On 11/03/19 3:46 PM, Nicolas Cadieux wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Someone will come up with a more intelligent answer than me but I 
>> have been running QGIS with a 10 year old dual core laptop with 
>> Windows 7-64 and 4Go of memory.  I find that the actual limits are 
>> mostly imposed by the data and the project complexity rather than the 
>> software.   An SSD did save the laptop from the garbage bin!
>>
>> For anything serious, I use a desktop computer that would make most 
>> gamers cry with envy...
>>
>> Nicolas
>>
>> Le 10 mars 2019 à 17:19, Irene Vicatos <eirinivic at yahoo.gr 
>> <mailto:eirinivic at yahoo.gr>> a écrit :
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I am currently working with the QGIS version 2.18 Las Palmas but I 
>>> will soon switch to the latest 3.4 LTR version.
>>>
>>> I have been reading through the question blog in order to figure out 
>>> which are the minimum hardware requirements for the latest version. 
>>> All previous given answers are already outdated. More specifically, 
>>> I would like to know, since I am a laptop owner, what are the 
>>> following minimum requirements:
>>>
>>>   * 1) Speed of CPU and how many cores.
>>>
>>> 2) How much disk space is needed for installation.
>>>
>>> 3) Size of Hard Disk and swap space.
>>>
>>>  *
>>>
>>>
>>>   * 4) Minimum RAM memory.
>>>  *
>>>
>>>   * 5) Display and screen resolution and lastly.
>>>
>>> 6) Graphics memory.
>>>
>>> Many thanks in advance and looking forward to your answer.
>>>
>>> Irene Vikatou
>>>
>>>  *
>>>
>>>
>>>  *
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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