June 22, 2009

Civil 3D 2010 System Requirements

For those of you who may be wondering why your Civil 3D renderings are constantly crashing, the answer could be that you need a system upgrade. Civil 3D requires a lot of available system memory. If you are using the typical Windows XP 32-bit box with 4GB of RAM, Civil 3D is actually only getting about 1.7GB of RAM. That is, unless you have invoked the famed 3GB switch. Then, Civil 3D may get up to about 2.3GB of RAM.

Here is the information I would consider when purchasing a new system for Civil 3D 2010:

Overall System:
(in order of preference)

1. Windows Vista 64-bit 8GB RAM
2. Windows XP 64-bit
3. Windows Vista 32-bit with 3GB switch
4. Windows XP 32-bit with 3GB switch
5. Windows Vista 32-bit
6. Windows XP 32-bit

Processor:
Autodesk's minimum recommendation is: Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon dual-core processor, 3GHz or higher with SSE2 technology

Recommend quad-core if you plan to do rendering.

Graphics Card:

A middle-of-the-road Direct3D video card. Make sure the card has Discrete Memory. This means that the card comes with it's own memory and won't try to "steal" memory from your system.