Understanding software compatibility and system requirements is essential before installing any application, as both determine whether software will function correctly on a given system. Compatibility focuses on what specific hardware or operating systems a program supports, while requirements define the minimum and recommended specifications needed to run it.
Compatibility & Software Requirements
One of the things that we need to do when we're evaluating software and determining whether we're going to install it or not is take a look at its compatibility and software requirements.
Let's first address the difference between what compatibility is and what requirements are, because there is a little bit of an overlap between these two terms. I've purchased software before that had certain hardware compatibility lists, or HCLs. An HCL is something that some software comes with, where it's only compatible with certain hardware. An example of this would be like Adobe Premiere. I had Adobe Premiere and it only could use certain graphics cards — and I'm just going to use this one as an example, a GeForce RTX 4090. It had a list of these different graphics cards that it used. So that's compatibility: what is it compatible with? All software, everything that your computer does, needs some sort of graphics processor to it, but this certain software only had certain graphics cards that it could really work with.
Then we have requirements. That would be something like, maybe there's a requirement that the software doesn't care which hardware it uses for its GPU, but maybe it needs something like 24 gigabytes of RAM with the GPU, or maybe it has some sort of CPU processing requirements. So some sort of minimum requirements that these two have.
So where are the overlaps between these two terms? There are times when we may look at the requirements for certain software and it lists out what the requirements are, and it lists out maybe some hardware that's required or software that's required. So we can consider that as coming into the realm of compatibility, but it's really listed out as a requirement. Now, I don't want you to get wrapped up between these two words here. Just realize that there is a little bit of a difference between those two terms.
One of the big compatibilities that we need to look at is, is it compatible with the OS that you're working with? For instance, there are Apple products, there are Microsoft products, and there are Linux operating systems that are out there. So whatever software we're purchasing, does it install on the proper platform that we're using? Making sure that it's compatible with the OS that you have.
One example might be the different browsers that we use. For instance, Safari really just operates on Apple. Links really just operates on Linux. Edge is primarily used for Microsoft. They're associated with certain platforms. Now, there might be cases where you could make it install or make it run on some of these other platforms, but generally speaking they're associated with these specific platforms, whereas Chrome will actually operate on any of these platforms.
We also have hardware compatibilities, and that GPU was one example that I gave there. But there is other hardware on your system, and depending on what your software interacts with, then it might be compatible with certain hardware and not other hardware.
Now, this is not as common. What we see with a lot of software is it just can be installed on any hardware and it doesn't really matter. It's more dependent on the operating system than the actual hardware. But there is some software that interacts directly with the hardware, and in those cases that's when you might have something like a hardware compatibility list.
What is very common is some sort of system requirements: some sort of minimum amount of RAM, some sort of minimum amount of storage to get a good experience. It might also require a certain amount of CPU or GPU. So this is pretty common — with our software we have certain system requirements, minimum requirements.
Let's take a look at some requirements for some different software. This is for Premiere Pro. So, Adobe Premiere Pro, and we see that there are some processors, the minimum and the recommended. We see the same thing for operating system. We see from a memory standpoint 8 GB versus 16 GB recommended. So the left here is the minimum and then the right is the recommended. We can see that there are different system requirements for us to run Premiere Pro.
We can do the same thing for Minecraft. Here's the Minecraft site that lists out the operating system requirements. We also see some hardware requirements for this. So for instance, RAM: the required is 2 GB and the recommended is 8 GB.
It's not just hardware though, it is software as well. Here's the server right here, so if we were to install Minecraft server — so this is for the Minecraft server — what we see here is that there's a requirement that Java Runtime Environment version 8 or higher is required. So we would have to install this software, because that's a requirement to run the Minecraft server.
Requirements that I commonly see are around the CPU, RAM and storage requirement. There are a lot of games out there that might require some sort of GPU, or maybe some sort of video RAM requirements for that GPU. Perhaps there is some sort of requirement whether it's 32-bit or 64-bit. And then also, possibly you need some sort of external hardware token to make sure that it can operate correctly.
There is some hardware that's 32-bit and some hardware out there that's 64-bit, and the same thing with the operating system. There's 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and you need to make sure your software is compatible with that. But most of our systems nowadays are all 64-bit, so this is not as much of a concern nowadays as it used to be.
I'm on my Windows 11 machine. If I wanted to see exactly if this is 32-bit or 64-bit, I could click on the start button here and type in "about this PC" or "about your PC" and hit enter. With this up, we can see that it tells us the processor and the system type. It's a 64-bit operating system and it's an x64-based processor. So it tells us both the software and the hardware side here, that this is 64-bit. Once again, this is not something that you see as common out there — I mean, the 32-bit is not as common out there. Most of the stuff nowadays is all going to be 64-bit.
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