macOS

These pages guide you through installation and licensing to the point where you have the application in front of you and are ready to start work. After installation, all applications are run from either desktop icons, the browser, or from the command line using arguments.

Tip:  For an overview of the documentation and quick access to the main topics, go to Nuke Home.

System Requirements

Qualified Operating Systems

• macOS 10.15.x (Catalina)

• macOS 11.x (Big Sur)

Note:  Other operating systems may work, but have not been fully tested.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

• x86-64 processor, such as Intel Core 2 Duo or later.

• 5 GB of disk space available for caching and temporary files.

• At least 8 GB of RAM.

• Display with at least 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution and 24-bit color.

• Graphics card with at least 512 MB of video memory and driver support for OpenGL 2.0 (minimum requirement).

• To enable optional GPU acceleration of Viewer processing, you need OpenGL 2.0 with support for floating point textures and GLSL.

• To enable Nuke to calculate certain nodes using the GPU, there are some additional requirements. For more information, see Requirements for GPU Acceleration.

• R3D Rocket cards require the Rocket Driver 1.4.19.0 and Firmware 1.1.16.5 or later.

Note:  To avoid graphical problems, such as text disappearing in the Viewer and Node Graph, it is important to keep your graphics card drivers up-to-date. Driver updates can be obtained from the websites of the graphics card manufacturers (for example, www.nvidia.com and support.amd.com).

Note:  If you’re using R3D Rocket graphics card, note that using it in Nuke will most likely only be considerably faster when you’re reading in at full resolution. If you’re reading in at half resolution, for instance, using Nuke without the R3D Rocket card enabled may be faster. This is because the R3D Rocket graphics card is designed to be fast when reading in multiple frames at the same time. This is not how Nuke works internally, and therefore reads with the R3D Rocket card disabled may sometimes be faster when working in lower resolutions (< 4K widths). Note that the R3D Rocket card always produces better results than Nuke when downsampling. Also, the R3D Rocket card can only be used by one application at a time, so if you are viewing multiple Nuke scripts at once, you may only be able to use the R3D Rocket card in one.

Requirements for GPU Acceleration

If you want to enable Nuke to calculate certain nodes using the GPU, there are some additional requirements.

AMD

On Mac, integrated AMD GPUs are supported on the following Intel CPU Macs:

• Any late 2013 Mac Pro onward (including 2019 Mac Pro),

• Mid-2015 MacBook Pros onward, and

• Late 2017 iMac Pros onward.

All supported Mac Pros include a multi-GPU support option, where applicable. Bitwise equality between GPU and CPU holds in most cases, but for some operations, there are limitations to the accuracy possible with this configuration.

Warning:  Although AMD GPUs are enabled on other Mac models, they are not officially supported and used at your own risk.

Note:  OpenCL must be installed for Nuke to enable AMD GPUs.

Note:  We recommend using the latest graphics drivers, where possible. For information on the recommended driver for each GPU, see https://www.amd.com/en/support

Multi-GPU Processing

Nuke's GPU support includes an Enable multi-GPU support option. When enabled in the preferences, GPU processing is shared between the available GPUs for extra processing speed.

Note:  Multi-GPU processing is only available for identical GPUs in the same machine. For example, two AMD FirePro W9100s.