Hardware and platform requirements
RenderMan XPU™ is is a hybrid rendering engine
, based on a multi-device architecturethat 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.
CPU: XPU requires a newer CPU than RenderMan RIS does. A 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.
- Operating systems:
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 that supports the AVX instruction set or better. (Note that this is above the minimum requirement for RIS.)
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 graphics drivers
are availableinstalled.
On Linux, XPU is supported on Linux requirements
- CentOS/RHEL
. On Windows, XPU is supported on Windows 10. Detailed requirements will be available closer to release as platforms are evolving.- 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
- Licensing requirements
- RenderMan XPU is only available to commercial customers of RenderMan.