4.5 System Requirements

Amira runs on:

Windows 2000/XP/Vista, 32-bit
Windows XP/Vista (Intel 64/AMD64 architecture), 64-bit
Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) with Intel CPU
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 for x86_64 or compatible

Amira relies on hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3D graphics. Please note that if software rendering is used, rendering performance may drop significantly, especially for visualization techniques like volume rendering. Some visualization techniques may also require 3D texturing or programmable shaders, available on recent graphics boards. For platform-specific details on hardware acceleration, see below.

Amira requires a display resolution of at least 1024x768 and at least 15 bits of color depth. We strongly recommend 1280x1024 with 24-bit color depth at least.

Apart from 3D graphics hardware, probably the most important system parameter is main memory. You should have at least 512 MB, preferably 2 GB or more.

The speed of the processor of course is also an important parameter. However it is less critical than the graphics system and the main memory size. For the PC versions, we recommend at least a 2 GHz processor.

4.5.1 Troubleshooting

Amira is a very demanding application that extensively uses high-end features. Experience shows that such applications tend to reveal instabilities in system hardware, hardware drivers, and the operating system. A common problem is insufficient main memory. We recommend you configure enough swap memory in addition to physical memory. The total amount of virtual memory should be at least 1 GB. 2 GB would be even better.

Especially on PC platforms, OpenGL drivers today are not always as robust as desired. Also, system crashes due to bad memory chips or unstable power-supply are not rare. If you experience problems or instabilities with Amira on your Windows platform, we recommend that you follow these steps:

Click on all the demo scripts in the Online User's Guide. If the system crashes, turn off hardware acceleration (choose the extended button from the Windows display settings dialog) and try again. If this eliminates the problem, there is a bug in your OpenGL driver. Try to get a new driver from the web site of the manufacturer of your graphics board.
Try using a different color depth in the Windows display settings dialog. Try 24 or 32 bit.
Load the lobus.am data set and visualize it with a Voltex module. Turn on the spin rotation (turn it with the mouse in the viewer and release the mouse button while moving the mouse, so that the object continues moving). Let it run overnight (turn off the screen saver). If the system has crashed or frozen the next morning, you probably have a hardware problem.

If this does not help, or if a reproducible error occurs on different computers, then it might be a bug in the Amira software itself. Please report such bugs so that they can be eliminated in the next release or a patch can be prepared.

4.5.2 Microsoft Windows

Amira runs on Intel or AMD-based systems with Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Vista, 32 bits and 64 bits.

Graphics Hardware: You should use a graphics board with OpenGL support and texture mapping capabilities. Some visualization techniques may also require 3D texturing and programmable shaders, available on recent graphics boards.

Note: On Windows Vista, you may want to disable Windows Aero for saving hardware resources and achieving best 3D performance with Amira. In Control Panel, open Appearance and Personalization, then click Personalization. You can alternatively right-click an empty spot on your desktop and click Personalize in pop-up. Click Window Color and Appearance, and then click Open Classic Appearance Properties for More Color Options. Now you can select a Color scheme different from Windows Aero, such as the Windows classic theme.

In order to add custom extensions to Amira with Amira Developer Pack you will need Visual Studio 2005, while Visual Studio 2008 is not officially supported for development. Even though not supported, you may compile new modules with Visual Studio 2008, but you will need to install the Visual Studio 2008 C runtimes additionally to Amira on any Windows PC that uses your custom modules.

4.5.3 Linux

The Linux version of Amira as been developed and tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and 5.0.

On other Linux distributions this version might not run because certain required system libraries are missing or because different versions of these libraries are installed. In particular you may need to install libg2c.so included in compat-g77 package (you may copy it as libg2c.so.0 in Amira installation directory under lib/arch-Linux...-Optimize/).

Amira is also available for Linux IA64 and Linux AMD64/Intel 64 systems.

Graphics Hardware: Amira works with the current 3D graphics drivers from nVidia and ATI under XFree86 4/Xorg. It has also been successfully tested with other X-servers like the 3D Accelerated-X servers from XI graphics.

Notes:

After a standard installation of Linux, hardware acceleration is not necessarily activated, although X-Windows and Amira may work fine. To enable OpenGL hardware acceleration specific drivers may have to be installed. This can dramatically increase rendering performance. Sometimes it is necessary to disable the stencil buffers (by starting Amira with the option -no_stencils) to get acceleration.
On some distribution, you may see incorrect display of some parts of the user interface, such as the segmentation editor. This is a known Qt issue. You can work around this by disabling the composite option in the extension section of your XFree86.conf or Xorg.conf configuration file:
```
Section "Extensions" 
     Option      "Composite"     "disable" 
EndSection 
```

In order to add custom extensions to Amira with Amira Developer Pack you will need gcc 4.1.x on RHEL 5.

4.5.4 Mac OS

The Mac version of Amira has been developed and tested on Mac X 10.5 Intel CPU. This version might not work properly on other Mac OS releases or non-Intel CPU Apple platforms.

In order to add custom extensions to Amira with Amira Developer Pack you will need gcc 4.0.x provided by the standard development environment XCode.

Graphics Hardware: Amira works with the current Mac 3D graphics drivers from nVidia and ATI.