Does any one know from Autodesk what the absolutely minimum specs that flame can run on, on an iMac? I know its contingent upon what ill be doing in flame so lets just say lots of beauty, conforming, 2k - possibly 4k, etc…Not anything tooooo crazy like a mile long tree, but ya never know…
Whats your experience and what do you recommend for someone like myself wanting to invest in an iMac to run flame?
How about something like this…?.
32 gb 2666 MHz DDR4 for RAM
3.2 ghz 8-core intel Xeon W processor
Radeon Pro Vega 56 8gb graphics card
So I was able to run Flame well enough on a 2012 MacBook with considerably worse specs. My jobs were primarily low-end web stuff, so typically I wasn’t working with anything denser than 2K ProRes 4444. 4K (even with the proxy workflow) got pretty hairy, and I was never brave enough to take on jobs in dense formats like EXRs with it.
The thing that makes Flame surprisingly suited to modest hardware is the ability to pre-render stuff in increments and not bog your hardware down with a million repetitious things at once. With that in mind, I think the important thing here you left out here is to figure out a good solution for Framestore.
In my especially ghetto case it was a 1TB Saumsung T5 velcroed to the back of the machine, but if it’s possible I recommend getting a separate internal drive dedicated to it.
I’ve been running flame on the specs in the image for the last 5 years. I recently upgraded to a Mac Pro but the machine still works and gets it done. So you should be fine with those specs. It’s not going to break any speed records but you’ll be able to work. What’s most important, after operating Flame, is that it fits into your budget.
We still have an iMac Late 2013 Core i7, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4 GB and a 3.2TB Fusion Drive on which Flame is running from time to time stable and fine. Of course not the fastest machine but running good.
Resurrecting this thread a bit as I’ve encountered several shows recently where Flame Artists working on iMacs have had major hardware failures and have been really, really screwed. iMacs are beautiful machines and I’ve owned several. But, they aren’t exactly amazing at dealing with prolonged heat and dust. You can’t open up the case and blow all the cat and dog hair and dust out. That and the prevalence of machine learning tools taxing the gpu heavily, and, well, it’s only a matter of time before catastrophic logic board failures put you at the Genius Bar in tears.
