Q100153: Hardware recommendations for all our products

SUMMARY

This article is aimed at providing more information regarding hardware recommendations for Nuke/NukeStudio/Hiero/Mari/Modo/Katana/CaraVR/Flix/Colorway. 

 

 

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.

 

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

 

Usage Notes

Some of our teams who use all these products on a daily basis are currently running with the HP Z800, Z620 and Z640 machines with Nvidia Quadro, GTX and Kepler cards with 2GB of vram, Intel Xeon 6-12 cores or higher, Windows 7/RHEL 6 and 24-32GB 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 a minimum of 500GB will help. 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 outline in the pages above. 

We use Alexa 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 has very specific requirements for graphics cards so always guide yourself by the minimum 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. You can find this here: 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. 

 

CaraVR: CaraVR provides support for only certain headsets for VR work review and while our team is working on expanding this support it is always recommended to check the Online Help for information on the current headsets CaraVR provides a monitor out plug-in for. You can find more information about this here: Q100167: CaraVR compatible headsets

 

Modo: Modo has similar hardware restrictions as Mari in terms of using the Advanced Viewport so we recommend using the system requirements page on the Modo side and looking at the tested workstations when looking at computer configurations. 

 

We're sorry that we can't be more specific as if we made a 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.

Finally, you might want to browse the Studio SysAdmins forums as these are the IT people who have to support the studios, so they will be the ones making equipment purchases and will definitely know what works best in a real world environment.