System requirements
Premation draws every frame on the GPU — the viewport, the pop-out viewports, the cached playback and the export. That single fact decides what hardware matters. A fast CPU with no usable GPU will not run it; a modest laptop with a working graphics driver will.
Since 0.9 the frames are drawn by a native engine, premation-engine, which the
app starts as its own process. It talks to the GPU directly through Dawn (the
library Chromium uses for WebGPU), on Direct3D 12 on Windows and Metal on
macOS. There is no WebGL2 tier and no software fallback any more: the engine
either gets a real graphics adapter or tells you why it could not.
The short answer
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| GPU | A GPU with a working Direct3D 12 driver (Windows) or Metal (macOS) | A recent dedicated NVIDIA or AMD card, or Apple silicon |
| RAM | 8 GB | 16 GB or more |
| OS | Windows 10 (x64) or macOS 13 | Windows 11, or a current macOS |
| Disk | ~1 GB for the app | Plus room for exports — a PNG sequence is large |
| Display | 1440 × 900 | 1920 × 1080 or wider; a second monitor for popped-out panels and viewports |
| Node.js | Only if you build from source: Node 20+ | — |
| ffmpeg | Ships with the installer — nothing to install | — |
We do not publish a list of supported graphics cards. The engine was developed and benchmarked on Windows with a discrete NVIDIA GPU; treat the figures in the release notes as figures for that class of machine, not as a promise for yours.
The GPU, in detail
One backend per platform
The engine asks for the native backend of the operating system and no other: Direct3D 12 on Windows, Metal on macOS. On a machine with more than one GPU it asks for the high-performance adapter, and it switches to the adapter from the same vendor as the one the app window’s own graphics process is using, so that finished frames do not have to cross between GPUs.
Colour precision
The project’s bit depth (8, 16 or 32 bits per channel) sets the precision of the engine’s intermediate buffers. 32-bit float needs a GPU that can both filter and blend 32-bit float textures; a device that cannot do both renders the frame at 16 bits instead of failing.
No software renderer
There is deliberately no CPU fallback for the picture. If the engine cannot start on your GPU, the app stops with a message that names the reason — see If the engine cannot start. It does not hand you a blank stage and let you find out at export time.
Outdated graphics drivers are the single most common cause of a machine that “should” work but doesn’t. Update them from the GPU vendor (NVIDIA / AMD / Intel) rather than relying on Windows Update, then start Premation again.
Video decoding
Footage is decoded by the engine, using the GPU’s hardware decoder where there is one and falling back to software per clip if a stream is refused. On Windows the engine uses Direct3D 11 video acceleration on the render adapter, then NVIDIA’s NVDEC. Intra-frame codecs such as ProRes and DNxHR have no hardware decoder on Windows GPUs and always decode in software, so a heavy ProRes timeline is a CPU question as much as a GPU one. On macOS the engine uses VideoToolbox.
Memory
Memory scales with composition resolution and with how many pre-comps are being cached, not with the length of the timeline. 8 GB is workable for 1080p work. 16 GB is the point at which a 4K composition with several nested pre-comps stops being a consideration.
Export is not the memory-hungry part: the engine renders each frame and streams it straight into an ffmpeg child process, so a multi-gigabyte MP4 never passes through the app’s memory.
Operating systems
| Platform | Status |
|---|---|
| Windows 10 / 11, x64 | Available — .exe installer |
| macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) | Available — .dmg, one per architecture |
| Linux, x64 | Available since 1.0.2 — .AppImage. Needs FUSE 2 (libfuse2) and a Vulkan-capable driver; Wayland runs through XWayland |
See Installing Premation.
ffmpeg
Since 1.0.1 every installer ships the ffmpeg that MP4 (H.264), WebM (VP9), GIF, MOV (ProRes 4444) and the HDR10 / HLG MP4s are encoded with. Stills, PNG / JPEG / EXR sequences, WAV, Lottie and project export never needed it.
Premation checks it at startup and before every video export. If security software has removed or blocked it on your machine, the app says so in plain terms and repairs it in one click — Window ▸ Customize… ▸ Appearance ▸ Video Export shows its state any time. Full detail: ffmpeg and codecs.
Running in a browser
Not supported. The engine is a separate native process that the desktop app starts and supervises, so the interface cannot draw anything in an ordinary browser tab.
Check your machine in two minutes
Windows graphics
Press Win + R, run dxdiag, and open the Display tab.
Under Drivers, check the driver date, and under DirectX Features that
Direct3D Acceleration is enabled. If the driver is years old, update it from
the GPU vendor.
If you are building from source
You additionally need:
- Node.js 20 or newer, and npm.
- Git.
- The engine’s own toolchain: it is C++20, built with Clang (
clang-clon Windows), CMake presets and a vcpkg manifest.native/README.mdin the repository has the setup. A packaged build refuses to be produced without the engine. - A C++ toolchain for the native SQLite index used by the project dashboard — though the app falls back to an in-memory index if the native driver is unavailable, so this is not a hard blocker.