In the following the system requirements for visualization in GeoDict are described.

Windows

GeoDict uses OpenGL to visualize structures and results in 3D. GeoDict is compatible with the oldest possible OpenGL version (1.1), which is guaranteed to be available in any Windows system. However, some visualization features require more advanced OpenGL versions:

• rendering animated streamlets requires OpenGL 2.0
• rendering spherical particles requires OpenGL 3.3. If this version is not available, a much slower fallback solution is used.

If no hardware acceleration is present, Mesa software rendering is used automatically. The necessary Mesa libraries are included in the GeoDict installation folder.

Linux VNC

For Linux remote sessions, we recommend using VirtualGL and TurboVNC for remote 3D rendering. The installation of these tools is described in the High Performance Computing handbook.  

Linux X-Forwarding

It is also possible to connect from a Linux terminal to a Linux server using ssh -X, without the installation of VirtualGL and TurboVNC. In this case, visualization in 3D is only possible when Indirect GLX is enabled on the Linux terminal (it is not necessary to enable this on the Linux server that runs GeoDict, but it must be enabled on the terminal that runs the X11 server). By default, this option is disabled in many cases. The status of this option can be checked with

Output is, for example:

To enable this option is not straightforward, because it works differently on different Linux systems or different graphic cards, and often requires a system administrator to change the config files of the system. Because of this complexity in the setup, we recommend in general to use TurboVNC for remote logins instead of ssh -X.