System requirements

OSG can run on most computers, as well as mobile devices with OpenGL ES installed which is a subset of OpenGL 3D Graphical API that was specially designed for embedded devices. OSG has been designed to take advantage of multi-processor and multi-core architectures, and works fine on both 32 and 64 bit processors.

Since OSG is an OpenGL-based scene graph API, it is recommended that you have an AGP or PCI-Express graphics card which guarantees satisfying OpenGL performance. In fact, most professional and consumer grade graphics hardware on the market nowadays should suffice for development needs. OSG is capable of working with a very low version OpenGL and limited graphics RAM, at the price of losing particular rendering features and functional extensions. Therefore, it is suggested that you have the latest version of the device driver installed on your machine before programming with OSG. A graphics card with 256 MB or 512 MB of memory will be a good start, too.

The needs for disk space and system memory depend on specific application requirements and the scale of the datasets to be rendered. Basically, the core OSG binary and library file size is up to 30 MB, without any debug information. The size of the executable file will be even smaller and only those shared library files are necessary at runtime.

Note that developers who decide to build OSG completely from the source code have to make sure there is at least 3GB of free disk space available for storage of intermediate files generated during the compilation process.