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FreeSurfer System Requirements

Freesurfer is available for the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. The [wiki:Download download page] lists the supported platforms. Matlab is required to run the FS-FAST component of Freesurfer (but Matlab is not required to run the reconstruction utilities).

A 2GHz or faster processor, at least 2GB of RAM, and a 3D graphics card (with a GPU and its own graphics memory) with accelerated OpenGL drivers, is recommended. Freesurfer is highly CPU and memory intensive (and moderately disk intensive), so concentrate on boosting those performance aspects (more memory is better). Most modern video graphics card will perform fine, but be aware that graphics cards that use CPU memory as video memory will have a noticeably slow redraw rate.

Freesurfer requires about 2.3GB of disk space for the full installation, which includes the Freesurfer binaries, support libraries, the MINC and FSL toolkits, and sample MRI data.

The volume and surface data files produced by Freesurfer for a typical subject (assuming two structural MRI scans of source data) consume about 300MB of disk space.