Inspire System Requirements

A list of supported operating systems and minimum requirements for hardware and memory.

Operating System
Windows 10 (64-bit)
Windows 11 (64-bit)
Notice: As of October 14, 2025, Microsoft Windows 10 will reach its end of support. Following Microsoft's messaging, all Altair 2026 applications will no longer support Windows 10. Altair is providing this information to help our customers prepare and accommodate for this change. Altair 2026 will support the Windows 11 operating system, along with our other Linux-based operating systems. Please contact your local Altair support teams if you have any questions or concerns.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (64-bit)
Rocky Linux 9.4 (64-bit)
Important: The Print3D tab and the Porosity check on the Manufacturing tab are not supported on Linux.
Memory
16 GB of RAM (higher recommended)
15 GB or more of free hard disk space
CPU/Graphics Hardware
OpenGL 3D graphics accelerator compatible with OpenGL 3.3 or higher
Vulkan 1.2 or higher
OpenCL 2.1 required
True color (24-bit) support
Install/update to most recent OpenGL patches/drivers
1920x1080 screen resolution or higher for optimal user experience
4 GB or higher dedicated RAM
CPU AVX2 support
Windows: Only dedicated AMD, Intel® Arc™, and NVIDIA GPUs are supported (integrated onboard Intel chipsets are not supported) with the following exceptions:
  • Inspire Rendering requires a dedicated NVIDIA GPU (AMD, Intel® Arc™, and integrated onboard Intel chipsets are not supported).
  • Inspire Fluids and Implicit Modeling work best on an NVIDIA GPU from the following list but will run on a CPU-only computer. For optimal performance, we recommend NVIDIA RTX graphics with at least 16 GB of RAM. Smaller amounts of RAM (4 GB or 8 GB) will work depending on model size and complexity.
    • Supported NVIDIA GPU generations include Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada, Hopper, or newer.
    • Supported NVIDIA Graphics Drivers include version 460.89 or newer.
Linux: Only dedicated NVIDIA GPUs are supported (AMD, Intel® Arc™, and integrated onboard Intel chipsets are not supported).
Video Recording
Any GPU can be used to record animated GIFs.

MP4 recordings require an NVIDIA Quadro P series (or RTX) or newer GPU with a driver version of 537.70 or higher.

Additional Information on Driver Installations

The NVIDIA Driver Update recommendation is to use the Custom installation option and select the Perform clean installation option to validate that there are no conflicts in DLL/drivers.

The same should be done with AMD hardware and drivers as well using AMD’s custom uninstall tools.

  1. Number of simultaneous jobs. Use of a workload management middleware like Altair PBS is highly recommended to ensure optimal and dedicated usage of the CPU resource.

  2. Typical node configuration is based on dual CPU socket processors.

  3. It is extremely important to populate all the memory banks on the motherboard.

  4. In Hybrid mode, it is recommended to set a number of MPIs that is a multiple of the number of sockets and then set the number of OpenMP in a way that number of MPIs x number of OpenMP equals the number of physical cores.

  5. Hyper-Threading (HT) may increase performance by around 10% on single node. In this case, the recommended setup is to run 2 OpenMP per MPI, with a number of MPIs that matches the total number of physical cores on the node. On multinode systems, it is better to not use HT.

Platform Support (altair.com)

Hardware Recommendations and Certifications (altair.com)