
RenderMan
RenderMan has been Pixar's core rendering technology for over 25 years. It's goal is to meet the ever-increasing challenges of 3D animation and visual effects. Today, RenderMan has been completely modernized, with a state-of-the-art ray tracing architecture. Used in the biggest blockbusters, such as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Jungle Book, RenderMan is capable of delivering the highest quality visual effects with unparalleled creative flexibility and artistic control.
Hardware Recommendations
Processor
Rendering
RenderMan is a CPU-based, multi-threaded rendering application, therefore the more processor cores the better.
Graphics
GPUs are an important aspect of the future direction of rendering that Pixar is currently researching, some of which has already demonstrated in public. RenderMan 21 introduces GPU accelerated denoising, with further GPU support planned in upcoming releases. Therefore given current software design decisions, your budget is better spent on more CPU cores rather than multiple graphics cards. We recommend the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 for this application.
Storage
We recommend having two solid-state drives which provides the best performance:
- Primary Drive: SSD for the operating system and applications
- Secondary Drive: SSD for active projects; a dedicated SSD will offer optimal performance
2.5-inch SATA SSD performs at ~500MB/s
M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD performs at ~2500MB/s
For long term storage or backup, infrequently accessed files, we recommend a 4TB to 18TB hard drive. Hard drives also work well for storing export files as the export/rendering process is generally not write intensive.
Memory
In general, 3-6GB 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.
Configuration Recommendations
HP Z8 G4 Workstation
$13,075
HP Z8 G4 Workstation
$9,575
HP Z840 Workstation
$5,050
HP Z840 Workstation
$3,500
HP Z6 G4 Workstation
$6,500
HP Z4 G4 Workstation
$3,300
Running additional applications on this system?
The recommended components and configurations provided on this page are specific to this software. If you plan on running other applications, please view our recommendations for them as well and choose a configuration that best suits the needs of the application requirements collectively. Feel free to contact us for further assistance.