System Requirements

Contents

Operating systems

Linux

GNU/Linux is fully supported on Intel compatible PCs and Apple Macintosh computers under

  • Matlab 7.4 (32-bit and 64-bit), or later
  • GNU Octave 3.2 (32-bit and 64-bit), or later

Psychtoolbox should run well on any recent Linux distribution. Testing and development however occurs mainly on the most recent Ubuntu Linux releases.

It is recommended to keep up with the latest distribution releases.

The NeuroDebian project is an effort to provide convenient access to neuroscience-related software on the Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions. The NeuroDebian APT archives include a Psychtoolbox snapshot release, which has been packaged to be ready-to-use with GNU Octave.

The DownloadAdditionsForNeuroDebian script allows you to use these packages with Matlab as well. For more, see the Linux installation instructions.

We generally recommend Linux as the operating system of choice for demanding experimental setups, which require the highest timing precision, precision for color or luminance displays, general performance and flexibility.

Apple Macintosh

Psychtoolbox is also being developed and tested under Apple Mac OS X. Supported are

  • 32-bit Matlab R2007a and later
  • 32-Bit Octave 3.2.x on 10.4.11 “Tiger” and later.

  • 64-Bit Matlab on 10.5.8 and later

    However, using OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” or later together with 64-Bit Matlab is recommended for full functionality.

Exhaustive compatibility tests have been run on 10.4.11, 10.5.8 and 10.6.2 with 32-Bit Matlab R2007a and 32-Bit Octave 3.2.3, and some testing by the developers has been performed on 10.5.8 with 64-Bit Matlab R2010b and on 10.6.8 and 10.7.4 with 64-Bit Matlab R2012a. Regular testing currently happens on 10.4.11 “Tiger” with 32-Bit Matlab R2007a and 32-Bit Octave 3.2.3 and on 10.7.4 “Lion” with 64-Bit Matlab R2012a, but most OSX versions should work reasonably well for many tasks, according to user reports.

The current toolbox releases are not supported under OSX 10.3 or earlier anymore. The last version that worked on 10.3 can be downloaded by specifying the special flavor parameter Psychtoolbox-3.0.8-PreTiger in our DownloadLegacyPsychtoolbox legacy downloader script.

The PowerPC platform is no longer supported by the version 3.0.10 Psychtoolbox. If you need to use a PowerPC machine, stick to version 3.0.9.

In general, operating system versions 10.4 “Tiger” and 10.6 “Snow Leopard” seem to be relatively unproblematic in use, i.e., most of the many operating system bugs we found now have workarounds implemented in Psychtoolbox. 10.5 “Leopard” was a rather buggy operating system, especially for multi-display stimulus presentation and stereoscopic stimulus presentation. 10.7 “Lion” mostly has restrictions in the precision for visual stimulus timestamping due to various bugs in the operating system. Please install the Psychtoolbox kernel driver to resolve these issues (see PsychtoolboxKernelDriver or >> help PsychtoolboxKernelDriver).

Windows

  • Matlab 7.4 (32-bit) or later
  • Octave 3.2.4 (32-bit)

64-bit support: Running under Matlab or Octave in 64 bit mode is not yet supported on MS-Windows (cf. Runtime environment support).

If you choose to use Matlab, you may need to install Microsoft Visual C runtime libraries to make it work, specifically vcredist_x86.exe. The installer should give you instructions on how to do that if necessary.

Psychtoolbox-3 runs under Microsoft Windows XP, as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.

We do aim to keep the toolbox working under these and future versions of Windows, but full support for all features is a lower priority for us than Linux or Mac OS X.

As of December 1, 2009, Windows Vista and Windows-7 have been tested for basic compatibility with PTB-3. Precision of sound presentation hasn’t been tested at all due to lack of suitable testing equipment. Test of visual stimulus presentation on 3 test setups showed somewhat mixed results, especially dual display presentation and presentation timing were rather disappointing. We are aware that many people do run the toolbox under Vista or Windows 7 and there were not many reports of timing trouble so far.

We cannot however recommend Window 7 at all for dual-display stereo stimulus presentation or for tasks with a need for high visual timing precision. For some caveats with respect to Vista and later see our FAQ entry about Vista and Windows-7.

All in all you are off worse with Vista or Windows-7 instead of XP with Psychtoolbox, so there is no reason to switch to it. Vista and Windows 7 seem to provide less performance than XP while at the same time posing higher hardware requirements.

Runtime environment support

Matlab versions prior to version 7.4 are no longer supported by current PTB version 3.0.10. Our installer will redirect you to an old and outdated version 3.0.9 of PTB whose basic functions may still work with older versions if you use a pre-V7.4 Matlab, but in case of any trouble or bugs, you will be on your own with such an ancient Matlab version.

If necessary, a 64-bit Matlab installation with installed 32-bit compatibility support can be run in a 32-bit mode by starting it with a command line switch. matlab.exe -win32 will start 32 bit Matlab on Windows, matlab -glnx86 will start 32 bit Matlab on Linux.

Installation of a 32-bit Matlab in parallel to a 64-bit Matlab is optional, so you may need to run your Matlab installation disk again if the 32-bit mode is not immediately functional on your 64-bit system. We hope to provide 64-bit support on MS-Windows for Psychtoolbox by the end of 2012, but we can’t make any guarantees about the progress of 64-bit support.

Additional software

Multimedia engines: Apple Quicktime vs. GStreamer

On 32-Bit Mac OS X Psychtoolbox requires Quicktime 7 for movie playback, movie creation, video capture and recording. Quicktime is installed on any OS X system by default. We recommend staying up-to-date with the latest releases for best performance and for security reasons.

On 64-Bit OS X, GStreamer is mandatory, Quicktime is no longer supported.

On Linux you need GStreamer for these operations, but GStreamer is a de-facto standard component that ships with all modern Linux distributions.

On Windows you can choose between the installation of Apple Quicktime 7 or the open-source GStreamer Multimedia framework.

See GStreamer (or >> help GStreamer) for installation instructions for the different systems. We intend to switch completely to GStreamer and deprecate Quicktime support. Windows users are encouraged to give GStreamer a try while it is still optional.

There have so far been two reports that the most recent Quicktime versions do not work well – or at all – with 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system. Quicktime version 7.1.6 is known to work without trouble on 64-bit Windows though. At least on 32-bit versions of Windows-7, Quicktime version 7.6.5 is known to work correctly.

For video capture support on Windows you will normally use the GStreamer video capture engine. This should provide reasonable video capture support with most video devices on Windows. Linux has excellent video capture support thanks to the GStreamer libraries. On 32-Bit OS X, we still have to rely on Apple’s Quicktime, but intend to replace it with GStreamer in the future.

For video capture support on Windows with the alternative, Mac OS compatible, Quicktime Sequencegrabber engine, you would need to install a Quicktime video digitizer component. The free WinVDIG is known to work for USB webcams and standard consumer DV cameras with Firewire connectors and Psychtoolbox has been tested with some version of that plugin. Another (untested) option is the VDIG from AbstractPlane, which costs a small amount of money, but presumably comes with commercial support. Please note that Quicktime video capture capabilities on MS-Windows are very basic and limited, probably only useable for projects with low demands, so there isn’t any real reason to prefer this over use of GStreamer. This option will likely get removed when we deprecate Quicktime support for Windows.

Basic hardware requirements

  • Intel PCs: Any Intel-compatible PC that is capable of running the 32/64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/Windows-7 or 32/64 bit GNU/Linux.

  • Intel Macs: Any Intel-based Macintosh computer that is capable of running OSX 10.4 “Tiger” or later, or 32/64 Bit GNU/Linux.

  • The Psychtoolbox distributed by the Debian project also supports other processor architectures, e.g., PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, Sun UltraSparc, IBM S/360 and some others.

Graphics hardware requirements

Basic Psychtoolbox functions should work on any OpenGL 1.2 capable graphics card with at least 16 MB of video ram (VRAM). Fast stimulus drawing and use of the more advanced features requires recent graphics hardware.

In general, you should not try to skimp on the GPU, as performance of your stimulus script and the types of stimuli you can create with ease will depend much more on the horse power and features of your GPU than on the performance of your CPU.

If you want to use all Psychtoolbox features at full performance and precision, make sure to get a recent Direct3D 10 or 11 capable (a.k.a. OpenGL 3 or 4 capable, a.k.a. ShaderModel 4 or 5 compliant) graphics card from NVidia or AMD/ATI. Almost all cards of the NVidia GeForce 8 series and later (e.g., 8600, 8800, 9600, 9800, GTX 280 etc.), as well as all cards of the AMD/ATI Radeon HD series and later (HD 2400, 2600, 3000 series, 4000 series, etc.) and their corresponding counterparts from the NVidia Quadro series and ATI FireGL / FirePro line of cards are technically state-of-the-art and Psychtoolbox can take full advantage of their features.

The latest generation of integrated Intel HD graphics cards, e.g., Intel HD 2000, HD 3000, as found in many modern “Intel Core” processors, provide decent functionality, accuracy and performance for not too demanding tasks. They are OpenGL 3 and Direct3D 10 compliant. Numeric precision is on par with recent NVidia or AMD cards for most (but not all) accuracy tests that have been executed on a Intel HD-3000 under OSX 10.7.4 “Lion”. Absolute graphics performance is of course significantly lower than that of current discrete NVidia or AMD cards.

Older Intel graphics cards are problematic for all but the most trivial visual stimulation tasks: While the Intel GMA X3100 series cards and similar are also Direct3D 10 compliant in theory, in practice they suffer from limitations. Users of Intel-based Macs should be aware that some Macs (e.g., old Intel MacBook) use a built-in Intel GMA graphics adaptor. The GPUs of the GMA-950 series are known to have very low graphics performance and a very restricted feature set. They are cheap and sub-standard by any definition. See this Wikipedia article for further information.

Products from Matrox, Via and S3 or from other niche vendors are not recommended. As Matrox and S3 seem to have mostly retreated from the 3D graphics market, most of their products are not a good choice for OpenGL based applications like Psychtoolbox. Even the products that nominally claim to support hardware accelerated OpenGL, have a pretty limited feature set and performance.

# More detailed information and recommendations for graphics hardware#

For dual-display work (e.g., binocular stereo stimulation), we strongly recommend using dual-head or multi-head graphics adapters (i.e., one card with two or more output connectors) instead of multiple separate adapters. We expect dual/multi-head single-card performance to be higher and the likelihood of graphics driver bugs to be lower. While separate cards may work, we do not guarantee this and do not provide any support for troubleshooting. Note that stereo work may benefit from the display synchrony provided by some of the dual-head cards. Synchrony is usually hard to achieve with separate cards. We also recommend to avoid Mac OSX for dual display real-time stimulus presentation, as Apple seems to be mostly incapable of and uninterested in implementing decent support for high performance, tear-free dual display support. For static stimuli or use as a control monitor, OSX may be good enough.