QuikGrid

Pros

• Runs Fast, Even on Legacy Hardware If your hardware can run Windows 95 and above, you can run this software. Designed by an academic, this little program will make the most of whatever hardware you throw at it.
• Works with x86, x32 and x64 Architectures Even though this program was first built to work with 32bit machines (with cross-compatibility for 16bit where applicable), the community has continued to develop it so that it can take advantage of 64bit processors; this means the program can now visualize over 100 million datapoints!
• Free and GNU You’ll never pay a dime for QuikGrid, and since it’s licensed under GNU continued development is always possible.

Cons

• No Longer in Development The original developer for QuikGrid no longer uses Windows and is no longer able to provide detailed practical support for the product. That being said, there are still some users upgrading the program to work on modern hardware and the original developer still maintains a website where these updates can be found.

QuikGrid is a free program for Windows that visualizes data 3D elevation maps.

If you’ve ever wanted to visualize your data as a 3D model or heat contour map, QuikGrid is definitely worth checking out.

This program interprets a set of scattered data points to create maps on a grid; you can choose to either go with a 3D model (using x, y, and z points) or with a heat contour map to help visualize your data.

What’s really interesting about this software though is the fact that it can do so much with so little; a 200x200 grid with 30,000 data points can be rendered is about 3 minutes on a Pentium 2 computer with no GPU, for example. If you’re running the 64bit version of this program you’ll be able to crunch amazingly large datasets with an excess of 100,000,000 data points and grids of massive size in just a matter of minutes.

Since QuikGrid is made to work on both legacy and low-end modern hardware, it’s not hard to see why it’s so well-loved by hundreds of thousands of students, educators, and scientists around the world.

One thing we do have to point out though is the fact that the help files for QuikGrid may not work properly in newer computers (Windows 7+). You can get around this by installing the official Microsoft HTML Workshop program from the Microsoft website.

The software is also no longer being developed by the original author; since the program is licensed under GNU others have continued its development and upgraded it to work well with 64bit processors.

Aside from that though, QuikGrid is an amazing tool that lets people even on decades-old hardware visualize data in interesting ways – it’s free, it’s easy to use, so we think it’s definitely worth trying at least once.

Pros

• Runs Fast, Even on Legacy Hardware If your hardware can run Windows 95 and above, you can run this software. Designed by an academic, this little program will make the most of whatever hardware you throw at it.
• Works with x86, x32 and x64 Architectures Even though this program was first built to work with 32bit machines (with cross-compatibility for 16bit where applicable), the community has continued to develop it so that it can take advantage of 64bit processors; this means the program can now visualize over 100 million datapoints!
• Free and GNU You’ll never pay a dime for QuikGrid, and since it’s licensed under GNU continued development is always possible.

Cons

• No Longer in Development The original developer for QuikGrid no longer uses Windows and is no longer able to provide detailed practical support for the product. That being said, there are still some users upgrading the program to work on modern hardware and the original developer still maintains a website where these updates can be found.