Unreal Engine GPU requirements and the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell for nDisplay and LED walls

Unreal Engine GPU requirements and what the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell covers

Epic Games' hardware page for Unreal Engine recommends a DirectX 12 compatible graphics card with "8 GB or more" of graphics RAM, and for LED walls its nDisplay pages require a sync card in every render node. The NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Workstation Edition brings 32 GB of GDDR7 with ECC, 10,496 CUDA cores and 200 W to an Unreal Engine 5 workstation, and NVIDIA lists it for its sync board. That makes it a card for editor seats, previs and review, and a candidate for a render node whose content fits into 32 GB. Epic itself publishes no memory figure for such a node.

The pages cited here are Epic's documentation for Unreal Engine 5.9 (preview), read 12 November 2026. The 5.9 release notes, last updated on 9 November 2026, describe a preview; the last full release Epic announced is 5.8, in a forum post of 17 June 2026. The hardware pages for 5.8 and 5.9 have the same rows, so what follows holds for both.

What Epic's hardware page asks of an Unreal Engine 5 workstation GPU

Epic Games, Hardware and Software Specifications for Unreal Engine and the pages on hardware ray tracing and the Path Tracer (documentation for 5.9, preview, read 12 November 2026); NVIDIA datasheet 5108623 (April 2026); system memory from NVIDIA's quick start guide for RTX PRO Blackwell cards; operating systems from the RTX Enterprise release notes 621.14 (4 November 2026).

The only memory figure on Epic's page is the "8 GB or more" of the recommended hardware. Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and the Path Tracer are described by API level and card family, with no figure in GB. The family Epic names for Lumen, "NVIDIA RTX-2000 series or newer", is by our reading the GeForce RTX 20 Series and no reference to the RTX 2000 Ada or the RTX PRO 2000. The page names no professional card; the typical system at Epic Games that it describes, a Lenovo P620 with 256 GB of DDR5, carries a graphics card with 16 GB.

For drivers Epic recommends the latest stable release of each card maker and prints no NVIDIA version on this page. The card runs on NVIDIA's RTX Enterprise driver. The release notes of 621.14 (4 November 2026) call Release 620 the latest Production Branch release; they and the notes of 597.30 and 582.99 list the card as "NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell", without the edition. Epic's page on synchronisation in nDisplay prefers Production Branch or Studio drivers to New Feature Branch drivers "because they tend to be more stable". Branches and end dates are in our guide to the NVIDIA RTX Enterprise driver on Windows 10 and 11.

Editor seats, previs and real-time review on 32 GB

Sorting work to this card is our mapping, since Epic gives no memory per task. We place the 32 GB card at seats where levels are built and lit in the editor, where previs scenes are blocked out and where a scene is reviewed in real time. Its four DisplayPort 2.1b outputs drive four displays at 3840 × 2160 and 165 Hz or two at 7680 × 4320 and 100 Hz.

One published measurement exists for the card in Unreal Engine. Puget Systems' professional GPU roundup of 18 December 2025, run with Unreal Engine 5.5 on a Ryzen 9 9950X3D, puts it 28 per cent ahead of the RTX 4500 Ada; our comparison of the RTX 4500 Ada and the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell has the other tests. The sources we work from contain no measurement of the card in nDisplay or behind an LED wall, so this page prints no frame rate.

Epic's Path Tracer page ties rendering on more than one GPU to cards that support NVLink or SLI, and NVIDIA's datasheet for the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition lists no NVLink. Plan the Path Tracer on one card per seat. The real-time renderers of architecture are covered in our guide to the GPU for Enscape, Twinmotion, D5 Render and Lumion, and Omniverse in the Omniverse system requirements.

We supply the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Workstation Edition across the EU; send us the number of seats and the workstation models and we reply with a written quote within one business day. The figures of the card are in our RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell 32 GB article, and ordering is described on the page to buy the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell.

nDisplay GPU sync needs a sync card in every render node

Epic's hardware page for in-camera VFX opens with the principle: "An in-camera VFX setup using Unreal Engine requires multiple machines to communicate with each other and drive the LED volume display." Each render node drives a part of the wall, and all parts have to show the same frame at the same instant. The same page states what that takes: "Render nodes: NVIDIA Quadro Sync is required to synchronize displays across an LED volume. Each render node machine must have this card in addition to its graphics card."

The synchronisation page explains the reason. Epic writes there that "specialized hardware sync cards and compatible professional graphics cards are necessary to synchronize the display of those rendered frames at exactly the same time on the physical display devices", and it names the method: "Genlock + framelock: This approach is the most desirable for virtual production." For a setup without it the same page expects at least a one-frame hardware delay, and for the Ethernet sync policy it notes that tearing among the displays remains possible.

Epic lists five prerequisites for synchronisation with NVIDIA GPUs:

• one sync card per nDisplay node;
• NVIDIA SLI or NVLink, for a multi-GPU setup only;
• compatible GPUs of the same specification in every node;
• a tri-level or bi-level sync generator;
• Windows PCs of identical specification for every node.

Epic's pages call the board Quadro Sync and Quadro Sync II. NVIDIA's user guide for the board (DU-08348-001_v09, March 2026) records its rebranding to RTX PRO Sync, the name under which it is sold today. For the cards that work with it, Epic refers the reader to NVIDIA's page.

RTX PRO Sync support of the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition

NVIDIA publishes two lists, and they are not identical.

NVIDIA's RTX PRO Sync page (15 October 2026) and table 3, "Supported NVIDIA RTX PRO Sync Products", of the RTX Enterprise release notes 621.14 (4 November 2026), read 12 November 2026. The release notes write "RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell" without the edition; the page also lists the RTX PRO 5500 and the RTX PRO 4000 SFF Edition, which the table in the notes lacks.

The RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition is in both lists. Its datasheet has no row for the sync board, so these two documents are the ones to cite in a tender. The passive RTX PRO 4500 Server Edition is in neither list, which matters because both cards carry the number 4500.

The user guide puts the rule as cards of the 4000 class and above. One board supports up to four matching GPUs, and NVIDIA's page gives two boards, eight synchronised GPUs and 32 displays per system, each with an asterisk the page does not explain. The board needs a free PCIe slot of its own and a six-pin PCIe or SATA power connector; it has one BNC connector and two RJ45 frame lock ports. External timing can be TTL, bi-level or tri-level, and the guide requires the timings of all displays to lie within ±50 ppm. By our count a node with one dual-slot RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition and the board therefore occupies three slot positions.

The GPU for an LED wall render node and what Epic leaves open

Epic's hardware page for in-camera VFX carries the version 5.9, and its content is older. For render nodes "with either single or dual GPU" it recommends the RTX A6000, the Quadro RTX 8000 and the Quadro RTX 6000, and for artist workstations it adds the RTX A5000. It names no Ada and no Blackwell card by model and gives no GPU memory figure, neither for a node nor for an artist seat.

Of the cards on Epic's render-node list, the one whose memory we have from an NVIDIA document is the RTX A6000 with 48 GB; the RTX A5000 of the artist list has 24 GB. Epic does not turn either figure into a requirement, and neither do we. The RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition has 32 GB and is on NVIDIA's sync lists, so a node whose content stays inside 32 GB can be built with it. A wall whose content needs more calls for a sync-listed card with more memory: the RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell with 48 GB at 300 W, compared in RTX PRO 4500 vs RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell and described in RTX PRO 5000 with 48 or 72 GB, or the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell with 96 GB.

In the NVIDIA documents read for this article, the RTX PRO 6000 is the only card of the line that NVIDIA connects with virtual production. Its blog of 19 March 2025 quotes Lucasfilm on ILM StageCraft environments with 6K and 8K real-time renders and on the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition; that is a customer statement without test conditions. For that case see our RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell specs, the comparison of the RTX PRO 6000, 5000 and 4500 Blackwell, the RTX PRO 6000 product page and, for stages that run RTX A6000 nodes today, RTX A6000 vs RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell. Which jobs of the 96 GB card the 48 GB and 32 GB cards can take is the subject of RTX PRO 6000 alternatives, and the step from older cards is mapped in replacing RTX A-series cards.

Two cards in one render node with mGPU or Multi-Process Rendering

Epic documents two ways to use two GPUs in one nDisplay node, and they differ on NVLink.

The first is multi-GPU rendering, where, in the words of the nDisplay overview, "the inner frustum can be entirely rendered on a second GPU". The same page describes the transfer between the cards: with NVLink, memory moves from GPU to GPU directly, and without it the transfer "might be slower as it has to go through the CPU over PCIe". The hardware page is stricter and says that for rendering to multiple GPUs on a single computer "all graphics cards must also support NVLINK".

The second is Multi-Process Rendering, whose prerequisites are at least two GPUs and SLI switched off. Epic writes that it "is also the recommended way to render with multiple NVIDIA ADA Lovelace GPUs, as they do not support NVLink which is recommended for Multi-GPU (mGPU) configurations". The page names Ada Lovelace cards in this context and says nothing about Blackwell. NVIDIA's datasheet for the RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition lists no NVLink, so for two of these cards in one node Multi-Process Rendering is the route Epic documents for cards without NVLink. Epic's driver line for several GPUs asks for version R512.59 or later; the current releases lie above it by version number.

Epic also describes an SMPTE 2110 workflow in which the render nodes of the inner frustum need no sync card while compositor nodes still use one; it depends on a compliant NVIDIA network card and is a different design.

Slots, power and memory around the card

The RTX PRO 4500 Workstation Edition is 4.4 in high and 10.5 in long, occupies two slot positions on a PCIe 5.0 x16 link and is cooled actively. Auxiliary power comes through one PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector, and NVIDIA's quick start guide lists an adapter from two 8-pin PCIe cables in the box. NVIDIA publishes no power-supply wattage for the card, so the 200 W are added to the load the machine already has; our overview of NVIDIA RTX power connectors covers the cables. The quick start guide asks for system memory of at least the GPU memory and recommends twice as much, 32 GB and 64 GB here; Epic's in-camera VFX page calls 64 GB the recommended minimum for most scenarios.

Two points from Epic's setup page belong in the plan for a node. Where a node drives more than one output, Epic has them configured as one large desktop with NVIDIA Mosaic, and nDisplay has to run as a fullscreen foreground application. Epic adds a caveat of its own: "At present, obtaining correct synchronization across nDisplay nodes can require some troubleshooting."

We also supply workstations built to order with this card, assembled and tested before delivery; describe the wall, the number of render nodes and the cards you run today, and we answer with a configuration and a written quote. Typical builds are laid out in GPU workstation builds from the RTX PRO 2000 to the 5000 and on the page to buy an RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell workstation; which makers' towers list the card is in RTX PRO cards in Dell, HP and Lenovo workstations.

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