System Requirements & Performance Setup

In this article, you'll learn

specter runs entirely in your browser and renders your full 3D building model in real time. That makes it more demanding than a typical web app: it needs a reasonably modern machine, a working graphics pipeline, and unrestricted communication to our servers.

These three settings account for the large majority of "specter won't load" reports. All of them are in Chrome and Edge, and all of them can be checked in under a minute.

Hardware acceleration → ON

This is the single most important setting. specter renders your model with WebGL, which requires access to your graphics card. Without hardware acceleration the model viewer and planner canvas cannot render at all.

Here's how:

To verify it worked, open chrome://gpu (or edge://gpu) and check that WebGL is listed as "Hardware accelerated" rather than "Disabled" or "Software only".

Memory Saver → OFF

Browsers put inactive tabs to sleep to save memory. When specter is put to sleep and you switch back to it, the session can break and require a reload.

Energy Saver → OFF

Energy Saver throttles CPU and GPU performance, which makes model navigation and planning noticeably sluggish.

Browser: Run the current stable version of Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. Older Chromium versions have known WebGL bugs, and outdated browsers are also a security risk. Internet Explorer is not supported.

Graphics drivers: Outdated or known-faulty GPU drivers are a frequent cause of models failing to load, showing rendering artefacts, or crashing after prolonged use. Update through Windows Update, or directly from Intel, NVIDIA, or AMD. Browsers maintain a blocklist of faulty driver versions and will silently refuse to use them.

Operating system: Keep Windows or macOS up to date. Driver and browser fixes often depend on it.

This is the area where problems are hardest to spot, because specter usually fails silently or partially: a white screen, an endless loading spinner, features that work one day and not the next, or saves that fail with a generic connection warning.

If specter works in a private browsing window, on a mobile hotspot, or on a personal device but not on your work machine or work network, the cause is almost certainly in this section.

Endpoint security and web filtering

Enterprise security suites (Zscaler, Sophos, Cato Networks, Netskope, and similar) sit between your browser and the internet and can block or alter requests to specter. Common symptoms:

Resolution: Your IT team needs to allow *.spectercloud.io in the security software and permit hardware-accelerated rendering. This cannot be fixed from within specter.

VPNs and tunnelled traffic

When all traffic is routed through a corporate VPN, it typically travels to your company's data centre before reaching us, adding significant latency to every request. Symptoms are slowness rather than outright failure: long initial loads, laggy interaction, slow uploads.

Where your IT policy allows it, accessing specter outside the VPN tunnel (split tunnelling) gives a much better experience. Consumer VPNs with built-in DNS or tracker blocking can also break parts of the application and should be disabled for specter.

Remote desktop and virtual machines

RDP, Citrix, and standard virtual desktops usually do not expose a real GPU to the browser. Since specter needs GPU rendering, the model viewer will fail with a WebGL error in these environments.

Resolution: Use specter on a physical machine, or on a GPU-enabled virtual desktop (for example an Azure NV-series instance).

Proxies and firewalls

Corporate proxies and firewalls can block the connections specter uses for live updates, and can interfere with direct file uploads. If uploads fail repeatedly or live updates stop arriving, ask your IT team to check proxy rules for *.spectercloud.io.

Ad blockers, DNS filters, and browser extensions

Privacy extensions and DNS-level blockers can prevent parts of the application from loading. Add spectercloud.io to the allow list of any ad blocker or privacy extension, or disable them for the site.

Screen sharing: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and similar tools can interfere with GPU rendering while sharing is active, sometimes causing a black or blank model viewer. If you see this during a meeting, stop sharing and reload.

Server distance: Our servers are located in Frankfurt, Germany. Users far from Europe will see longer initial load times regardless of local bandwidth.

Site connectivity: Construction site Wi-Fi is often the real bottleneck. Where possible, do heavy work (uploads, planning sessions, report generation) on a stable connection.

Display size: The model viewer looks noticeably better on a high-resolution screen and in full-screen mode. On a Full HD display with the viewer at half width, image quality and exported screenshots will be visibly lower. A second monitor makes a real difference when planning alongside the model.

Very large uploads: Uploading multiple large IFC files at once is memory-intensive on your machine. Upload the largest files one at a time for the most reliable result.

If you have worked through this guide and specter still does not behave, send the following to your specter contact. It lets us identify the cause quickly instead of guessing: