Q100153: Hardware recommendations for all Foundry products

Chris Wetherly

Updated : January 13, 2025 17:49

Created : August 12, 2016 16:26

SUMMARY

This article is aimed at providing more information regarding hardware recommendations for the Nuke family (Nuke, NukeX, NukeStudio & Hiero), Mari, Modo, Katana and Flix.

MORE INFORMATION

Unfortunately, we cannot make specific hardware recommendations for our products due to their usage dependencies and project complexity, which would drive the exact hardware requirements. We can advise however to follow the guidance notes below when looking into a hardware specification for using our products.

Minimum System Requirements

You should always be able to discern the correct configuration for your hardware by looking at the minimum system requirements for each product:

Nuke/NukeStudio https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/requirements
Hiero https://www.foundry.com/products/hiero/requirements
Modo https://www.foundry.com/products/modo/requirements
Mari https://www.foundry.com/products/mari/requirements
Katana https://www.foundry.com/products/katana/requirements
Flix https://www.foundry.com/products/flix/requirements

NOTE: The above pages are relevant to the latest version of each Product. To check the system requirements for previous product versions, please refer to that version's release notes.

Usage Notes

General: Some of our teams who use all these products on a daily basis are currently running with the HP Z840 and Z640 and Dell Precision 7820 machines with Nvidia Quadro, RTX, GTX GPUs with 8GB+ of VRAM, Intel Xeon 6-12 cores or higher, Windows 10, Windows 11, CentOS 7 and Rocky 9 with 32-128GB of RAM.

Nuke: With Nuke, the more RAM you have the better and generally a reliable GB Ethernet connection to a fast I/O external storage, or a fast I/O drive locally for caching with plenty of available space. If you want to use the GPU then you will need to look for CUDA supported cards or specific AMD ones per the Requirements for GPU acceleration outlined in the pages above.

We use AJA and Blackmagic cards for broadcast monitor output on Nuke.
Generally meeting the system requirements of Nuke will allow you to utilize the features of the future release of Nuke Studio, unless they are specialized on a specific hardware requirement which is upgraded.

Mari: Mari is a very GPU intensive application that can require large amounts of VRAM, as such we recommend to guide yourself by the recommended system requirements and look at the Mari tested workstations and graphics card for more information.

We also have put together a Knowledge Article that covers Mari's usage of hardware components and could point you in the right direction according to the projects you're looking to use Mari on:

Q100078: Mari's usage of hardware components

Katana: Katana requires a GPU that supports OpenGL shader model 4 for Viewer processing otherwise you will see errors and problems when previewing your geometry.

Modo: Modo and it's Advanced Viewport which is purely powered by the GPU, we recommend to guide yourself by the System Requirements section within the Release Notes of your specific version of Modo.

We're sorry that we can't be more specific as if we made very specific suggestions, that possibly caused more harm, then we wouldn't be able to help. If you have any questions about specific setups or hardware usage for specific workflows then the best thing would be to post on the Foundry Community forums as these are populated by users in a range of studio environments and they should be able to let you know what their studio is using for various levels of scripts.

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