Future System Requirements for Cinema 4D and Redshift

Bad Homburg, June 7, 2023 - At Maxon, we have always strived to maximize performance by taking advantage of the latest in hardware technologies. We recognize maintaining backward compatibility is essential to not disrupting our customers' production pipelines. However, there are often significant advancements in hardware performance that make maintaining backward compatibility an unattainable goal.

Consequently, in order to continue to take full advantage of technological advancements, future versions of Cinema 4D and Redshift will require the AVX2 instruction set. Changes are expected later this year, so it is highly recommended that users anticipate these updates and their impact on your pipeline.

AVX2

Introduced with 2013’s Intel Haswell processor and later in AMD's Excavator CPU family, the AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2) instruction set provided new features, instructions and a new coding scheme to developers.

As Maxon continues to modernize and improve Cinema 4D and Redshift over time, the inclusion of the AVX2 set will now become a requirement moving forward. Most users won't be impacted as the obsolete CPUs are 8 to 10 years old. But for those who will be affected, we want you to understand in advance that future versions of Cinema 4D and Redshift will not run on their legacy systems.

Obsolete CPUs are:

• Anything before Q2 2013 from Intel Desktop CPUs
• Anything before Q2 2013 from Intel Server CPUs (AVX2 introduced with the Xeon-Haswell based family of CPUs)
• Anything before Q2 2015 from AMD CPUs (AVX2 introduced with Excavator family of CPUs)

If you have any doubts as to whether your CPU utilizes AVX2, you can use CPU-Z to evaluate the instruction sets supported by your CPU.

We understand this may be a challenge, but we believe finding a balance between supporting older technology and embracing modern technology is an important step in keeping our software ready for the future.