System requirements

Image courtesy of Mihai Iliuta

The minimum system requirements for Maxwell Render are as follows:

Windows

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 7, 8, 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, Windows 11.

• 2 GHz Intel® Core2 processor, AMD Athlon 64 or better

• 1 GB RAM minimum. 16 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended

• 2 GB available hard disk space for installation

• Accelerated OpenGL drivers

• 3 button mouse recommended

MacOS 

• MacOS 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.12 (Sierra), 10.13 (High Sierra), 10.14 (Mojave), 10.15 (Catalina), 11 (Big Sur), 12 (Monterey), 13 (Ventura) and 14 (Sonoma).

• Currently, Maxwell can work on Intel-based processors; in the case of Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2,…), it will work only through Rosetta (not optimized for the Apple Silicon processors yet, but it should work normally). If you are running Maxwell from a plugin, you should run the host application in Intel mode using Rosetta (right-click on the app > Get Info > Run using Rosetta).

• 1 GB RAM minimum. 16 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended

• 2 GB available hard disk space for installation

• 3 button mouse recommended

Linux 64

• x86_64 distribution with a 2.6 Kernel and glibc 2.5

• Tested on Debian GNU/Linux 7 (wheezy), Fedora Core release 6 (Zod), CentOS release 6.5 (Final), Ubuntu precise (12.04.2 LTS)

• 2 GHz Intel® Core®2, AMD Athlon 64 or better

• 1 GB RAM minimum. 16 GB of RAM memory is highly recommended

• 1.7 GB available hard disk space for installation

• 3 button mouse recommended

GPU engine

• Graphics cards that support CUDA platform (Nvidia), running on Windows. No AMD or Intel will work, sorry. This means the GPU engine is not supported for Mac, as they don’t use Nvidia cards.

• The drivers should be up to date.

• Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing and Ampere architectures are supported (for reference you can check this table); it could work on Kepler architecture but it could be unstable and the experience won't be good. Currently, for the graphics cards using the Ada Lovelace architecture to work, you have to download this pack of files: . Then unzip it and paste the files included into this folder of the Maxwell installation folder (you need administrative rights to copy them there): C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell Render 5\extras-x64-v140

Denoiser

• Denoiser is capable of running on CPU and GPU, with Nvidia, AMD and Intel graphics cards; it works with CUDA (Nvidia) and also can work using OpenCL either in GPU (Nvidia, AMD or Intel) or CPU.

• When using GPU, we recommend having a graphics card with at least 2.5GB. This number is actually dependent on frame size, 2.5GB is for 2k pixels square imagery.

• When using Nvidia CUDA, the drivers should support at least CUDA 7.0

• When using AMD, the Catalyst driver should be up to date.

• In the case you get an error message when using CPU about OpenCL ICDs, it will probably be solved by installing one of these packages depending on your OS:

  • Windows: opencl_runtime_18.1_x64_setup.msi

  • Linux: opencl_runtime_18.1.0.013.tgz

• The Denoiser will first try to use CUDA, if it doesn't find a compatible card, it will fallback to OpenCL GPU (usually with AMD and Intel cards). If the image doesn't fit in the graphics card memory, you can then use OpenCL with CPU (which will use RAM memory).

For a description of the best hardware configuration for your needs, see the System Specifications FAQ page.