SIFT leans heavily on your GPU to provide fast animation, projection, pan and zoom capability. It also requires the use of high-speed disk transfers to allow visualization of dozens of gigabytes of instrument data.

Recommended system specs:

  • SSD (solid state disk) with 256GB of free space to use as workspace
  • A 64-bit operating system, at least Windows 7, macOS 10.10, or Linux
  • At least 8GBytes of RAM
  • Intel, nVidia, or AMD GPU with 2GB of video RAM and OpenGL 3 support
  • Up to a terabyte of conventional or solid-state disk to store GeoTIFF and/or native format imagery cases

While SIFT has been shown to operate on systems with lower specs – up to and including tablets – performance will be much more tolerable when working with large amounts of data when the specifications above are met. “Your mileage may vary.”

Interested users can find a comprehensive list of SIFT’s open source package dependencies with a brief description of the purpose and use of each.