Before using Open Inventor, check if your configuration meets the minimum system requirements described in this document.

Graphics boards and drivers

Please select below the platform of your choice to see associated requirements

Platform specific – System Requirements

C++ - Java - .NET

Open Inventor requires the following components to be installed and available on your workstation:

  • Microsoft Windows 10 or Windows 7
    NOTE: Remote display environments like RDP (Windows) or VNC (Linux) are not supported unless OpenGL 4 is available. Typically these environments only provide OpenGL 1.x support.
  • 6.5GB is approximate disk space requirement for an Open Inventor installation.
  • A validated graphics board and driver.
  • FlexNet floating license server version 11.16.2 (package available on download page)
  • [OPTIONAL] Cuda : 11 only required by RemoteViz H264 encoding
C++ Specific requirements
  • Compilers : Open Inventor is compatible with C++11, C++14 and C++17
  • Visual Studio
    • Open Inventor is currently built with
      • Visual Studio Professional edition 2017 64 bits
      • Visual Studio Professional edition 2015 (at least Update 2) 64 bits
    • Open Inventor (VS2017 build) can be used with
      • Visual Studio Professional edition 2019 64 bit

    Please note that Open Inventor is not compatible with The Express edition of Visual Studio.

  • The /DELAYLOAD (Delay Load Import) linker option is not supported by Open Inventor DLLs.
  • [OPTIONAL] If you use your own installation of CMake, it must be version 3.10.2 or higher.
  • [OPTIONAL] Qt: 5.15. If you wish to rebuild a complete Qt 5.15 distribution, please use the following arguments for the configuration step (from inside the Qt source directory):-top-level -opensource -confirm-license -nomake examples -nomake tests -skip qtandroidextras -skip qtconnectivity -skip qtdoc -skip qtdocgallery -skip qtlocation -skip webengine -skip qtpim -skip qtpurchasing -skip qtsensors -no-icu -prefix -opengl desktop -silent -debug-and-release -skip qtwebengine.
.NET Specific requirements
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 requires .NET framework 4.7.1
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 requires .NET framework 4.6.1
Java Specific requirements
  • JDK/JRE requirements
    • Open Inventor Java is tested and validated against JDK/JRE from Oracle for Open Inventor before v10.9 and against Open JDK 11 starting since Open Inventor v10.9
    • You need Visual Studio 2015 Runtime (crt). The redistributable package, vcredist_x64.exe, for this version of Visual Studio is delivered in %OIVJHOME%jrebin.
  • Support of OSGi : Open Inventor is partially compliant to OSGi requirements: most of Open Inventor java classes run successfully in any osgi application. However overriding some methods when extending an Open Inventor classes may not be possible especially when such methods are invoked from a native multithreaded context. Known Limitations : Loading of native libraries of Open Inventor is useless. JNI libraries and their dependencies are automatically loaded on Windows. So we suggest to not call any System.loadLibrary regarding Open Inventor native dlls.

Open Inventor Linux Headless is provided only in C++ and Java with common requirements Common requirements Open Inventor requires the following components to be installed and available on your workstation:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 or Ubuntu 20.04
  • 2GB is approximate disk space requirement for an Open Inventor installation
  • Windowing System : EGL lib provided with latest NVIDIA driver
  • [OPTIONAL] Cuda : 11 only required by RemoteViz H264 encoding
  • A validated NVIDIA graphics board and driver.

C++ Specific requirements

  • GCC 7or GCC 9 NOTE: Open Inventor is compatible with C++11, C++14 and C++17
  • glibc v2.27
  • FlexNet floating license server version 11.16.2 (package available on download page).
  • [OPTIONAL] If you use your own installation of CMake, it must be version 3.10.2 or higher.

Java Specific requirements

  • Open Inventor Java is tested and validated against JDK/JRE from Oracle for Open Inventor before v10.9 and against Open JDK 11 starting since Open Inventor v10.9
  • Support of OSGi : Open Inventor Java is partially compliant to OSGi requirements: most of Open Inventor java classes run successfully in any osgi application. However overriding some methods when extending an Open Inventor classes may not be possible especially when such methods are invoked from a native multithreaded context.

C++ - Java

Open Inventor requires the following components to be installed and available on your workstation:

  • RHEL release 8.0 / RHEL release 7.x / Ubuntu 18.04 / Ubuntu 20.04
  • 4.5GB is approximate disk space requirement for an Open Inventor installation
  • A validated graphics board and driver.
  • Windowing System : X11 R6 development and run-time environment
  • FlexNet floating license server version 11.16.2 (package available on download page)
  • [OPTIONAL] Cuda : 11 only required by RemoteViz H264 encoding
C++ Specific requirements
  • A C++ compiler matching the version used to compile Open Inventor. NOTE: Open Inventor is compatible with C++11, C++14 and C++17
  • GCC 9 (See Ubuntu build)
  • GCC 8 (See RHEL build)
  • GCC 7 (See Ubuntu build)
  • GCC 4.8 (See RHEL build)
    • It's important to know that GCC broke the ABI compatibility in the version 5. Open Inventor libraries are built using GCC 4.8, meaning it's using the old ABI and is not compatible with the new ABI. However, if you want to build your application with GCC version > 5, you can disable the new ABI using the define _GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0.
  • Motif v2.3.3
  • glibc v2.12
  • [OPTIONAL] If you use your own installation of CMake, it must be version 3.10.2 or higher.
  • [OPTIONAL] Qt:
    • RHEL 7 builds: v5.12
    • RHEL 8 & Ubuntu builds: v5.15

    If you wish to rebuild a complete Qt 5.15 distribution, please use the following arguments for the configuration step (from inside the Qt source directory):./configure -opensource -release -confirm-license -nomake examples -nomake tests -skip qtandroidextras -skip qtconnectivity -skip qtdoc -skip qtdocgallery -skip qtlocation -skip webengine -skip qtpim -skip qtpurchasing -skip qtsensors -no-icu -opengl desktop -silent -release -skip qt3d -qt-harfbuzz -xcb -no-use-gold-linker -prefix .

Java Specific requirements
  • JDK/JRE requirements
    • Open Inventor Java is tested and validated against JDK/JRE from Oracle for Open Inventor before v10.9 and against Open JDK 11 starting since Open Inventor v10.9
  • Support of OSGi : Open Inventor Java is partially compliant to OSGi requirements: most of Open Inventor java classes run successfully in any osgi application. However overriding some methods when extending an Open Inventor classes may not be possible especially when such methods are invoked from a native multithreaded context. Known Limitations
    • Loading of native libraries of Open Inventor is useless. JNI libraries and their dependencies are automatically loaded on Linux except for ImageViz.
    • If ImageViz classes are used, the load of all dependencies of the com.openinventor.imageviz.so library is required when the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not defined. The load of fei_proxy_ippro51 library is also required.
Graphics boards and drivers

The following section gives the list of graphics boards validated by FEI Visualization Sciences Group for Open Inventor. We also recommend reading documentation about OpenGL profile.

Open Inventor should run on any graphics system (board+driver) that provides a complete implementation of OpenGL 4.1. Please note that some features may require OpenGL 4.6. However boards and driver bugs are not unusual. We recommend using a professional graphics boards in order to benefit from the professional support offered by the vendors (driver bugs fixes, etc.).

Open Inventor 10 is tested on following GPUs

  • Professional graphics boards
    Vendor Model
    NVIDIA Quadro M2000, NVIDIA RTX A2000, NVIDIA RTX A4500, Quadro RTX 4000, Quadro P2000, Quadro P5000
    AMD ATI AMD Fire Pro W7100, AMD Radeon Pro WX7100
    Intel UHD 630
    Mesa v21.3.5

    All driver bugs are submitted to the vendors. A fix may be expected in a future driver release.

  • Standard graphics boards
    Vendor Model
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, GeForce RTX 3060, T1000
  • Due to vendors support policies, on standard graphics boards we are not able to commit to providing a fix for bugs caused by the driver.
  • Note regarding Intel platforms: We have detected an issue on Ivy Bridge GPU (HD graphics, HD2500, HD4000) that prevents the OIV shader cache mechanism from working as expected. In order to be able to run OIV correctly on these plateforms user must set OIV_SHADER_DISK_CACHE envvar to 0 in order to get OIV working. Newer Intel platforms such as HD 4600 are not concerned by this issue.
General recommendations
  • We recommend to always use a recent driver version for your graphics board.
  • The amount of GPU memory needed depends on the application. We recommend a minimum of 1GB on the board.
  • The memory bandwidth and the number of compute units provided by a graphics board can have a big impact on performance.
  • With an NVIDIA Quadro board we recommend to use the driver profile "Workstation app - dynamic streaming" for most applications, especially if using large geometry objects and/or VolumeViz rendering.  Applications with many small geometry objects should experiment with “3D App” profiles.
  • On laptops providing NVidia Optimus technology, we recommend to force the use of the NVIDIA GPU in order to get the best experience possible in all conditions.
  • We highly recommend to plug monitors to the graphic card of your computer and not to any connector directly mounted on the mother board