Hardware Guide for X3

[Doug Park]

Now that X3 is looming large on the horizon, I thought it would be good to post some guidelines for hardware for X3 so that you can make an informed decision if you plan on buying new hardware.

For the most part our system requirements will remain the same as for X2 with the caveat that X3 is designed for multi-core systems.

This means that for a few operations you may see a slight slowdown on single core and single core hyperthreaded hardware. While we will work to keep performance on these systems as fast as possible, our focus now and for the foreseeable future will be on multi-core machines.

To that end the following are my recommendations for X3.

1) More cores is better.

We have some performance optimizations coming in X3 that will utilize as many cores as you can get for some operations. Much of our development work has been done using i7s and other Quad Core hardware. We are pretty sure that some of the new 6 core machines will be an even better choice, but haven't done benchmarking on them yet.

We started focusing on the i7 hardware about a year ago because we figured that by the time X3 shipped it would slip off the bleeding edge and be more affordable. i7 hardware has now moved into the main stream price range. We are even seeing i7 laptops available.

This should make the older Core 2 Duos drop in price quite a bit. For someone that is looking for really cheap hardware that X3 will do good on a Core 2 Duo would be my recommended cheap machine. However, look around older quad cores are available in desktops in the $500 price range.

2) Memory.

X3 will be easier on memory for 3D operations than X2. In some cases this is very significant. Still, if you are getting new hardware more memory is better.

For a new machine I wouldn't get anything with less than 4 GB.

While memory speed still is important, the speed of memory in the multi-core machines is generally improving over time so it is becoming less of factor when looking at hardware.

3) A 64 bit OS is a must have.

Windows 7 64-bit is the best OS to run X3 on. X3 will ship as a 32 bit application.

The main reason to go 64 bit is that your extra memory will be used by the OS and other applications making your system faster when dealing with large models in Chief.