Maxwell

Processor

CPU vs. GPU Rendering

Maxwell 4 takes advantage of the GPU for rendering, however there are some aspects of the rendering process that can only be handled by the CPU. Therefore we recommend a processor with 4 to 6 cores.

Please view Maxwell's CPU + GPU Utilization chart for further information about CPU vs. GPU in this unique application.

Graphics

According to Next Limit, the GPU option speeds up the rendering process greatly... up to 10x faster than CPU rendering! This is possible due to the thousands of CUDA cores within NVIDIA graphics cards.

Maxwell can run equally well on both GeForce GTX and Quadro cards. We recommend an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, which currently offers the best performance to price ratio, but any recent high end NVIDIA card will offer great rendering performance with Maxwell.

While Maxwell does not support multiple GPUs as of September 2017, this feature will be released by the end of the year. Therefore we also have dual GPU recommendations below.

Storage

We recommend a solid-state drive (SSD) for the operating system and software.

In addition, we recommend a 4TB or larger hard drive for storage of the pre-rendered assets or the rendered export files if storing these files locally. Hard drives work well for rendering since it is generally not read or write intensive.

Memory

In general, 4GB of RAM per CPU core is recommended. For example, if you select a single 12-core processor, 32GB will suffice for basic tasks or 64GB for more demanding workloads.