Corelyzer takes advantage of hardware-accelerated graphics. While a primarily 2D visualization program, Corelyzer uses OpenGL to accelerate the rendering and take advantage of modern day graphics boards. This does mean that the performance of the application is not only dependent on the speed of your CPU but also the power of your Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Any modern day graphics card that can run video games from a few years back can easily run Corelyzer. Currently the leaders in graphics card technologies are Nvidia and ATI.

Corelyzer can use lots of hard drive space and main memory. It is recommended to have at least 2GB of RAM on your machine if you intend on looking at a hundred meters of high-resolution core images, or more. One more thing to note is that Corelyzer does not currently have any mechanisms to support heterogeneous display settings. This means that if you have a monitor that only goes up to 1280x1024 and another at 1600x1200, you will have to choose one or the other when setting up your Corelyzer display settings when running the application.