Hello!
I am plan to buy a computer but I am not able to be sure if computer will support PschoPy.
In the psychopy website it is indicated that intel i5 or i7 CPU is recommended. However the computer I planned to buy is AMD Ryzen 3 5300U, 16 GB RAM.
Does anyone can help me about it? Can I download PsychoPy to a computer which have AMD Ryzen 3 5300U ?
Thank you in advance
That CPU won’t be as powerful as a modern Intel i5 or i7, but it will probably be more powerful than those Intel chips were at the time when that recommendation was made.
So any reasonably modern CPU won’t really be a limiting factor for PsychoPy. What is far more important is the graphics card (i.e. the GPU). You almost certainly want a separate or “discrete” graphics card, rather than “integrated” graphics (where effectively the CPU tries to do double duty as a low-end GPU, which often isn’t satisfactory).
So the specifications of the graphics card are what you need to focus on. Again, probably any modern dedicated discrete graphics card will be OK, but definitely try to avoid relying on integrated graphics. Integrated graphics are a cheaper option for computers that will just be used to run typical office software and are not expected to do demanding graphical tasks, such as video editing or playing games. Any graphics card that performs well when running modern games will be well-suited to running experiments in PsychoPy.
EDIT: a colleague tells me that this recommendation for discrete graphics may not be as critical as it once was - careful performance testing with integrated graphics systems might show that they are sufficient for your needs.
Memory for the CPU can be a limitation for some experiments, so 16 GB is a good start there.
A solid-state hard drive (SSD) gives much better performance than an old-fashioned spinning hard drive (HDD), especially for things like quickly loading images or movies during your experiment, so that is strongly recommended.
That was helpful, thank you so much!