The creation of visualizations and the computational processing for the program are handled by the CPU. Working in pCon.planner with the ‘Realistic’ render style uses the power of the GPU. Rendering in OpenGL also makes use of the GPU.
To speed up the rendering process, it is recommended to use a CPU with a high number of cores. A higher clock speed will allow the system to render faster. The latest rendering engine used by pCon.planner, called OSPRay, makes use of specific processor functionalities. It is fully multithreaded and vectorized for Intel® processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. Important features include the SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 instruction sets, which can significantly reduce rendering times. When looking up the specifications of the processor, you can check whether these features are supported.
For OpenGL-based operations, such as those in pCon.planner, a (dedicated) graphics card from leading manufacturers like NVIDIA or AMD is required due to better driver support. One reason for this is that dedicated graphics cards have their own RAM, which is fast and directly connected, so they do not require RAM from the system. In addition, the graphics card requires an up-to-date driver.
To compare CPUs and graphics cards, you can use the following websites: