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System requirements
Neurones 3D is one self-contained Windows executable. It streams point clouds from disk, so a machine opens files larger than its memory. The requirements are short.
Requirements
| Operating system | Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit. Windows only today; a macOS build is on the roadmap. |
|---|---|
| Graphics | A GPU with DirectX 12 or Vulkan support. Integrated graphics work: they start in the Eco quality preset, which drops supersampling and effects and draws up to 3 million points a frame. On a laptop with two GPUs, N3D asks for the high-performance one. |
| Memory | Point clouds are indexed out of core and memory-mapped, so the working set is what is on screen, not the file. The heaviest case measured is composing a large USD stage for the first time: 6.5 GB peak for a 900,000-prim stage, after which reopening reads a cache. |
| Disk | Room for the application and for its local index cache, which is written once per file so that every later open takes about a second. The cache never goes beside your data, and shows its size and clears it. |
| Installation | None. Unzip and run n3d.exe. No runtime, no redistributable, no administrator rights for the app itself. |
| Network | None. No account, no activation server, no telemetry. The licence is checked on the machine. |
| Optional | ffmpeg on the PATH to bake flythroughs to MP4; without it, frames are written as PNG folders. |
What the numbers were measured on
- A 43.5 million point LAS opens in about 1.2 s and renders at 9.0 ms a frame (median); the index can be built at a forced 100 MB memory budget in about 16 s.
- A 127.8 million point, 7.9 GB E57 opens in about 22 s.
- The USD figures (59.3 s first open, 1.64 s every reopen) were measured on a Ryzen 9 5900X with 32 GB of RAM.
- Classification, segmentation, decomposition and the ground filter run on the CPU; the GPU draws the scene.
Performance changes are measured before and after against recorded baselines, and the numbers on this site are the measured ones.
If it does not start or runs slowly
- Update the graphics driver; the renderer needs DirectX 12 or Vulkan.
- Choose Eco under .
- Leave the first open of a very large file to finish: it builds the index once.
- Still stuck: submit a request with the version from .