Point Cloud Recommended Specifications

The most important aspect for processing Point Clouds is RAM: for 250 million points about 12GB of RAM is needed (the cloud itself is half that but the user will want to be able to hold a source and a destination). More RAM allows more clouds to be held in the memory. 

A SSD (solid state disk) instead of an HDD (hard disk drive) allows clouds to load faster. As SSDs generally do not have a huge capacity, it will be important to have additional storage, whether that's a traditional HDD or just a storage/backup server. 

As for processing power required, Point Cloud is a single-core program so focus on buying a processor with more GHz, rather then multiple cores. This means an i5 can be better than an i7 for less money.  AMD processors are fine too. 

It is necessary to have a 64-bit operating system. Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10 are all fine but XP is no longer supported. 

Point Cloud 2018 supports AutoCAD 2010 to 2018 (64 bit only) or use IntelliCAD 8.3 which comes free with Carlson 2018. 

It is recommended to have a separate graphics card, preferably nVidia GeForce.  

Summarized Specifications:

  1. 64-Bit Operating System - Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10.
  2. Single Core Processor - higher GHz rather then multicore
  3. 16GB RAM or greater
  4. SSD Drive
  5. HDD for storage