In most cases the built-in audio cards of the host computer are good enough for playing the sounds required, and one does not need to get special audio hardware. The need for special hardware arises if:
In general we recommend the use PCI/PCI-Express sound cards, if the built-in audio interface is not sufficient for the project.
As example of the kind of cards that one can use are:
We discourage the use of USB sound cards, since they are often a cause of trouble. For example an 8-channel audio interface might be able to generate only 6 channels in some circumstances. Due to problems like this we recommend that you do not use USB audio devices.
The role of the graphics card depends on the application type. As even our basic demos and calibration software uses advances OpenGL features, one should purchase graphics card (or get integrated graphics) from NVidia or AMD.
In some OpenGL-based application with heavy graphics the application performance may well be dependent on the rendering speed of the card. However, we often run demos off a stock laptop, using mid-range GPU.
For any OpenGL-based applications we recommend a discrete graphics card from AMD or NVidia.
Regarding price of the card, the common choice is to use "fairly fast" graphics cards. At the time of writing this would be NVidia GeForce GTX 650 or AMD Radeon HD 7850.
For running multi-display setups one needs to use cards with multiple outputs. In this respect the AMD FirePro-line offers the best cards, with up to 6 mini-DisplayPort outputs per graphics card.
The impact of the CPU on the system performance varies between different types of installations. The minimum CPU recommendation is a modern 1,6GHz processor from Intel or AMD.
For applications written with the MultiTouch CornerStone OpenGL/C++ a quad-core CPU is the best. CornerStone takes advantage of the multiple CPU cores very well, so having 4 CPU cores really helps. In this case we recommend:
Memory tends to be a simple issue - either there is enough memory, or too little.
We recommend 4GB RAM for standard multitouch applications. This is enough to run all the standard demo applications that come with the Cornerstone software package.
More memory may be needed to run application with large in-memory data-sets. In these cases the memory needs depend entirely on how much memory the application consumes.
MultiTouch CornerStoneSDK takes less than 200MB of disk space. The 3rd party support libraries and possible developer tools take easily 2-4GB Hard disk, which is still very little compared to the volume of modern hard disks.
The size requirements of the Hard disk depend entirely on the application needs, and unless there is a specific reason to get a large hard disk one can simply buy a normal hard disk in the 240-1000GB range.
Some applications may have special requirements for the Hard disk. For example a video-intensive application might require a RAID stack to be able to feed the video data from the hard disk fast enough for the graphics. In these cases there is no general rule, but one needs to judge the performance requirements based on the applications.
