The minimum recommended resolution for the primary display is 1920 * 1080 resolution typical of widescreen monitors available today. Mastercam displays on the primary monitor while applications such as Mastercam Simulator, Code Expert, or Tool Manager display on the secondary monitor. Most of our internal systems utilize dual monitors and we find this to be a more productive setup. More information on configuring the graphics card can be found at this Mastercam knowledge base article. We recommend using the automatic detect feature to detect which video card is installed. The latest drivers for NVIDIA and AMD can be found at the online links. The driver version can have a great impact on how the card performs. We often see issues that are resolved with updated video drivers. Make sure you are using up-to-date drivers from your card manufacturer. These do not generally have the capability to drive graphics intensive applications such as Mastercam. We do not recommend or support the use of onboard graphics found with some PC configurations. OpenCL is required for Mastercam to be able to hand off certain computation tasks to the graphics card to increase system performance. Other graphics cards can be used, but they must offer full OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.2 support. We recommend an NVIDIA Quadro® or AMD FirePro™ / Radeon Pro card with 4 GB or more of memory. When purchasing a new computer for Mastercam, one of the most important component is the video card. For large toolpath generation and simulation, we recommend 32 GB of RAM. We recommend a minimum of 8 GB of memory. When Mastercam uses all available RAM, it switches to using virtual memory space, which is stored on the hard drive and will dramatically slow the system down. We typically see a 50% reduction in toolpath calculation time with the latest Intel i7 or Xeon processors. Toolpath calculation and Simulation will generally run faster with a multi-core processor. With each release, more and more aspects of Mastercam are becoming multi-core processor aware. The processor speed will impact how fast the software will calculate and complete tasks. Mastercam X7 MU2 was the last release to support Windows 7 32-bit OS.

Mastercam requirements