This article is also available in Japanese.

This article is also available in Japanese.

One very frequently asked question goes like this: "I am going to buy a new workstation, which will mainly be used for running Zemax. What is the optimum specification?"

Well, there's no optimum, in the sense that bigger and better hardware always traces rays faster. Zemax is very efficient code and will run on quite modest hardware (see the minimum specification here). But it is also a big number-crunching application capable of handling extremely large problems, so there are sensible choices you can make to spend your budget wisely:

1. Choose the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (XP and Vista both had 64 bit versions as well) and use the 64-bit version of Zemax. Most 32-bit software runs fine on 64-bit Windows, so unless you have some compelling reason to stay with the 32-bit operating system you should always specify a 64-bit version of Windows.

2. Chose a CPU with as many cores as possible. Zemax is extremely well multi-threaded, which means it can split calculations up over all the CPUs in your computer. The 64-bit version of Zemax is currently capable of using up to 32 CPUs simultaneously, and we will extend this as CPUs with more cores become available. The 32-bit version of Zemax can drive up to 16 CPUs.

3. Get as much memory as possible. Each core needs a copy of all the data needed to trace rays, so the memory required scales linearly with the number of cores. We recommend at least 1 GB RAM per core in high performance applications.

These are the major recommendations for buying a highly-performing Zemax workstation. Other considerations are secondary. For example, Zemax does not place a high burden on graphics cards relative to the games programs they are designed to play. We recommend not using integrated graphics cards, as these share system memory and can be slow. But any card from ATI or nVidia, with its own memory and on the Windows Hardware Qualified List, will work fine. 

Similarly if you plan on doing work that will produce lots of data on the hard drive, you may want to specify a RAID disk array, or use a solid state drive (SSD) as a second drive for data writing and storage purposes. In the vast majority of cases a single SATA drive (which is what most computers use) will give excellent performance, and higher-performance disk drives are only necessary if you will be producing GB of data.