System requirements

Recommended system requirements

For new hardware purchases, we recommend the following system configuration:

  • OpenGL: 4.0 or above.

  • Dedicated graphics memory: 1GB or more

  • Graphics card: on Windows, and especially on Linux, a recent NVIDIA GPU

    • Geforce GTX 6xx or better

    • Quadro Kxxxx or better

On Mac systems, a dedicated graphics card is recommended over an integrated GPU.

  • CPU: Quad core CPU

  • Main memory: 4GB or more

With these system specifications, you are able to run any LuciadLightspeed application with optimal speed and performance.

Minimum system requirements

  • For hardware-accelerated visualization using a Lightspeed view:

    • Main memory: 2 GB

    • Graphics card: OpenGL 2.0 capable GPU

    • Graphics memory: 512 MB

    • ATI/AMD graphics cards on Linux are discouraged because of driver issues

    • Individual API components, such as density layers, may impose additional requirements on the OpenGL implementation

  • For hardware-accelerated line-of-sight calculations and image processing: OpenCL 1.0 driver with support for double precision floating point computations (cl_khr_fp64)

Although OpenGL 2.0 is the strict minimum for Lightspeed views, platforms that do not support more recent OpenGL versions are likely to show sub-par performance, instability or graphical glitches. If you are working in a virtualized environment, a VM properly configured to use NVIDIA vGPU for GPU virtualization will provide the best results. Otherwise, please check if recent graphics drivers are available for your system. If there are no recent graphics drivers available, the software-based ILcdGXYView may provide a better user experience on your platform.

Hexagon discourages the use of certain graphics hardware for LuciadLightspeed, because of the limited OpenGL support of that hardware, its age, or known issues. For a full list of discouraged graphics hardware, see Problematic GPUs.

Supported platforms

You can develop and deploy LuciadLightspeed applications with hardware acceleration on the following platforms:

Platform Version Operating System Architecture Supported GPU Vendors

Windows

Windows 8.1 and above

64-bit

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel HD

Windows Server

2012 and above

64-bit

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel HD

Linux

Various distributions

x86-64 (*)

NVIDIA, AMD

macOS

10.9 and above

64-bit

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel HD

(*) a minimum glibc (GNU C Library) version of 2.27 is required. The software-based ILcdGXYView is also supported on 32-bit Linux systems.

Support for multi-touch events in Swing applications is available only on Windows.

Java

As a Java API, LuciadLightspeed requires a JDK for development and a JRE for deployment. LuciadLightspeed requires at least JDK/JRE 1.8.

For users of Mac computers with Apple silicon

Even though you’re using an ARM-based processor, download and install a JDK for an x86 64-bit architecture instead of an ARM-based JDK.

The JDK/JRE requirements never change with a minor upgrade (an upgrade from 2016.0 to 2016.1, for instance) or a patch release of LuciadLightspeed.

Recommended JDK versions

We recommend using the latest version of any long-term support (LTS) release. At the time of writing, the LTS releases are Java 8, Java 11, and Java 17.

OpenJDK provider recommendations

We haven’t encountered any provider-specific issues. We have tested LuciadLightspeed using AdoptOpenJDK, Liberica, and several other OpenJDK providers.

OpenJDK 8 support considerations

LuciadLightspeed doesn’t officially support OpenJDK 8. The minimum supported version is OpenJDK 11 at the time of writing. We don’t test LuciadLightspeed on OpenJDK 8, but in practice, recent LuciadLightspeed versions seem to work fine on it.

JDK 11 and JDK 17 support considerations

As of version 2018.1, LuciadLightspeed supports OracleJDK/OpenJDK in compatibility mode. If you want to get rid of illegal access warnings or errors, use the --add-opens <module_name>/<package_name>=<reflectingmodule> flags. If you set the reflectingmodule value to ALL-UNNAMED, you allow all classes from the classpath to access the package.

In practice, any illegal access violation will come from these third-party libraries:

  • JIDE, used by Lucy’s tabbed interface front-end

  • JAI, used to:

    • Save models to GeoTIFF

    • Enable non-hardware-accelerated imaging operations

JavaFX

JavaFX has been removed from OracleJDK/OpenJDK 11. To compile a LuciadLightspeed application with JDK 11 or later, you need to use the OpenJFX library. For information on how to get started with OpenJFX, see the OpenJFX website. Note that if your application does not use the JavaFX features in LuciadLightspeed, OpenJFX will not be required at runtime.

Supported JVM implementations

We support the HotSpot JVM.