Blender 4.x supports three rendering backends: Cycles (path-tracing, photorealistic), EEVEE (real-time, faster), and the newer EEVEE Next. Each has different hardware requirements. Getting the right hardware depends on which you use most and the complexity of your scenes.
Cycles GPU Rendering
Cycles GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) or HIP (AMD) is the standard for serious Blender work. The GPU processes render samples in parallel — more CUDA cores and more VRAM directly speed up rendering.
The critical VRAM consideration: Blender Cycles loads the entire scene (geometry, textures, HDRI, materials) into VRAM. A scene that exceeds your VRAM spills to system RAM over the PCIe bus, which is dramatically slower. For complex scenes with high-res textures: 16GB VRAM is the practical minimum, 24GB for large scenes.
Recommended Builds for Blender
Mid-range Blender build: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 64GB DDR5, RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB, 2TB NVMe. The 16GB VRAM handles all but the most complex scenes. Ryzen 7 for preview renders and EEVEE, which uses CPU.
High-end Blender build: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 128GB DDR5, RTX 4090 24GB, 2TB NVMe PCIe 5.0. The 24GB VRAM and top-tier CUDA performance handles anything. The 16-core Ryzen 9 handles CPU rendering for OSL shaders and complex physics simulations.
Multi-GPU for Blender
Blender Cycles supports multiple GPUs and scales nearly linearly — two RTX 4070 Ti Supers render nearly twice as fast as one. If your workflow is primarily Cycles rendering, a dual-GPU setup with two mid-tier cards can outperform a single high-tier card at similar cost. Consider PSU requirements: two RTX 4070 Ti Supers under full load draw around 570W from the GPUs alone — a 1000W PSU is the minimum.