RenderMan XPU™ is a hybrid rendering engine, based on a multi-device architecture. 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: RenderMan XPU is currently supported on 64-bit Linux and Windows systems where the appropriate NVIDIA drivers are available.  On Linux, XPU is supported on CentOS/RHEL.  On Windows, XPU is supported on Windows 10.  Detailed requirements will be available closer to release as platforms are evolving.