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• RenderMan XPU™

is

•  is a hybrid rendering engine

, based on a multi-device architecture

• that can target multiple hardware devices. It can run

well on systems with no GPU at all, or it can utilize a powerful GPU on systems that only have a modest CPU, or it can combine CPU and GPU devices together for rendering.

• GPU acceleration RenderMan XPU™ requires an NVIDIA graphics card with the Maxwell architecture or later.  As always, the latest hardware will perform best.  CUDA support is required and RTX hardware is optional. Minimum hardware requirements have not been set, but as with any production rendering more working memory is always better.  For best performance, a card with 24GB or more of VRAM is recommended when dealing with complex assets.  A card with 11GB is currently considered to be the minimum.
  

• in three modes:

  • CPU only
  • GPU only
    
  • CPU + GPU

  See below for more details of the supported hardware and platforms.

  Hardware and platform requirements

  CPU

  RenderMan XPU requires a

CPU: XPU requires a newer CPU than RenderMan RIS does.  A Operating systems:

• CPU that supports the AVX instruction set

is required (AVX2 is not required, just AVX).  Performance improves with more hardware cores such as on the latest AMD and Intel systems, and with wider SIMD instruction sets, such as Intel AVX2.  Fast RAM sized appropriately for your assets is important, with 16GB minimum when used together with the GPU.

• or better.

  A minimum of 16GB of RAM is recommended for hybrid (CPU + GPU) processing.

  GPU

  For GPU acceleration, RenderMan XPU™ supports NVIDIA graphics cards from the Quadro, Tesla or Data Center GPU ranges, with the Maxwell architecture or later.

  See Operating Systems for graphics driver requirements.

  We recommend a minimum of 24 GB of VRAM for dealing with complex assets.

  Operating Systems

• RenderMan XPU is currently supported on 64-bit Linux and Windows systems

where the

• with appropriate

Nvidia

• NVIDIA graphics drivers

are available.  Detailed requirements will be available closer to release as platforms are evolving.

• installed.

  Linux requirements

  • CentOS/RHEL 7 
  • NVIDIA graphics driver version 440.59 or above. We recommend using the latest version wherever possible.

  Windows requirements

  • Windows 10
  • NVIDIA graphics driver version 460.41 or above. We recommend using the latest version wherever possible.

  macOS

  • Not currently supported


• Licensing requirements
  
  • RenderMan XPU is only available to commercial customers of RenderMan.