System requirements

In order to use SCIA Engineer version 25, your system must have the following system requirements.

Hardware components

* 4K is supported for the new interface of SCIA Engineer 25

A 3D mouse is not supported.

Software components

Below you can find additional information concerning the hardware components.

Processor

For the processor two parameters are important: the number of cores and the clock frequency. When you perform a linear calculation, the number of cores is the main parameter that determines the speed of the calculation. In a nonlinear and eigenmode calculation, both the number of cores and the clock frequency are determining factors. Next to the previously mentioned calculation types, the design checks run multicore as well. We advise an Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 with at least 2.4 GHz.

Memory (RAM)

SCIA Engineer, the solver and the Engineering Report are 3 separate processes that each require memory to perform their actions. Next to these processes, also Windows (min. 1.5 GB) and all other applications take some memory in use as well. To not run out of memory when performing memory demanding calculations, we advise to have at least 32 GB of RAM in the computer.

Graphics Controller

A minimum memory of 256 MB and the support of OpenGL 2.1 is required to run SCIA Engineer. This means that SCIA can also be run with an onboard graphics card. For some models that are graphically more demanding, the onboard graphics card may fail to render the structure. For this reason, we advise a dedicated GPU (Graphical Processing Unit). A low to mid end GPU should be adequate.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Every hard disk with a free disk space of 5 GB can be used to run SCIA Engineer. This does not mean that the HDD is not important. The read/write speed of the HDD has an influence on the performance of SCIA Engineer. In order to increase performance, we recommend an SSD (Solid State Drive). Some available SSD types are:

• (m)SATA: cheap, worst performance;
• M.2: best price/quality ration;
• PCIe: expensive, best performance.

Note that it’s recommended to keep 10% of free space to avoid issues such as reduced performance.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR OLDER SCIA ENGINEER VERSIONS

In the table below you find the system requirements for older SCIA Engineer versions.