Summary
Optioneer needs a powerful laptop, good internet connection and a bit of patience.
Make sure you use Google Chrome browser.
In general
Optioneer is a product that leverages a lot of data and computing power.
The majority of Optioneer's work happens in the cloud and uses server farms to carry out calculations and data processing.
Despite all that, the input of data and analysis of results requires a lot of data to set results of Optioneer's work in the right context. The burden of visualising and storing this data is on the user's machine. Optioneer's performance also depends on how quickly the data can be downloaded and uploaded to the server.
You need both a fairly powerful laptop and a good internet connection to operate Optioneer.
In general, if you have a 2-3 year old laptop and you have a laptop that is comfortable to handle ArcGIS operations or a work on a fairly complex model in common CAD packages, you are fine.
Broadband speeds upwards of 20Mb/s are recommended for a good experience. You should be fine if you can handle Zoom / Teams calls without hiccups or watch Netflix without issues.
Best practices
For devs and IT people: there are many issues we could resolve (and we are resolving) but some things do take time with Optioneer. We ask for 12 months to make it 'feel' like any other GIS product (stated in August 2021).
Do close down other programs that might be hungry for processing resources (GIS, CAD, any games, online conferencing, computer graphics programs)
Always load Optioneer with patience and do not refresh the browser for a few minutes, even if you are waiting for the data.
If you have any meetings or presentations, it is good to do a dry-run in Optioneer within 24hrs before as this guarantees that data will be cached. Cached data will load 10x faster next time.
If nothing loads in Optioneer at any given point, give it a few minutes. Try again - we might be applying fundamental changes to the system and haven't gotten into the habit of informing everyone (yet)!
Get one of Continuum Industries experts on using Optioneer - get advice and make sure that things run smoothly.
Sometimes your browser might say that Optioneer crashed and ask you if to wait or shut the page down. Best practice is always to wait. Things will load eventually!
Actual hardware requirements
Google Chrome (latest version).
Other browsers should work but why not just use Chrome?
Intel i5 or equivalent CPU
Computation happens outside of your machine. But you have to support the visualisation and manipulation of data.
16 GB RAM
Optioneer is likely to use only a few GB, but Chrome is very resource-hungry overall. As a result, your browser RAM-usage might be very, very high - hence the suggestion.
2 GB disk space - technically speaking. We don't store anything on your hard drive but we might cache it. Or store it temporarily.
Two screens - one to have Optioneer open and one to do 'other stuff' when Optoneer is calculating thing.
Internet speed connection: 20Mbps download. Upload is less of an issue. Basically, if you have difficulties with connection on Zoom / Teams calls, you will struggle to use Optioneer.