The fundamental computation of the VARIOGRAM procedure is binning: for each pair of observations in the input data set, a distance class and an angle class are determined and recorded. Let denote the number of distance classes, denote the number of angle classes, and denote the number of VAR variables. The memory requirements for these operations are proportional to . This is typically small.

The CPU time required for the computations is proportional to the number of pairs of observations, or to , where is the number of observations in the input data set.