System requirements
Check the minimal and recommended system configurations when using FEM-Design.
Minimal configuration | Recommended configuration | |
|---|---|---|
| System | Windows 7 SP1 64bit (with updates) + Microsoft .NET 4 + 4.5 runtime | Windows 10 or 11 (with latest updates) |
| RAM | 4 GB | 32 GB |
| CPU | Intel Core i3 - 2nd generation (or any CPU supporting AVX instructions) WARNING! Next major release will require 4th generation with AVX2! | Intel or Ryzen with 6 or 8 real cores. "threads" and "E-cores" don't help. |
| Free disk space | 40 GB | 500 GB |
| Monitor | 1280x800 resolution | 1920x1080 resolution |
| Video card | OpenGL 1.5 or DirectX 9.0 compatible video card | OpenGL 4.5 or DirectX 11.0 compatible video card |
| Other | SSD (Solid-state drive) |
Additional comments
The program generates several Gbytes of result files. Using HDD instead of SSD results in massive degradation of performance.
Some parts of the program use all the CPU cores, so having more of them improves overall performance. The parts that are not parallelized benefit from higher CPU and RAM clock (single-core benchmark score). The program mostly does floating point calculations that require fully functional core. "Hyperthreading" adds to the OS-reported core count, but duplicates only a small part, not what the program requires, so their presence can even make the execution slower.
At this point we have limited experience with the new Intel hybrid model. If you have such CPU, we recommend using Windows 11 that at least has chance for better load balancing. But even with that, the E-cores may actually decrease performance instead of increasing it.