AI Video System Requirements Checker

What the three-light checker checks

The checker above takes a machine and a model preset and returns three lights: one for the graphics card's memory, one for system RAM, and one for the CPU. It does not score a machine out of ten and it does not rank hardware. It asks a narrower question: for the workloads this site has actually measured, would this machine finish, finish badly, or not finish.

The inputs are the ones that change the answer — GPU, its VRAM, system RAM, logical CPU cores, swap or pagefile, and whether pinned memory is on. Nothing is inferred from a machine name.

The GPU and VRAM light

Pick the card, then state its memory. The card matters for the timing estimate; the memory decides the light. For the default stack the bands are: below 8,192 MiB red, 8,192 to 12,287 MiB amber, 12,288 MiB and up green. Amber means clips come out and the reports describe long cold runs, not a setup you would work in. Green means a run finished in this band on this site's own bench — it is not a promise of headroom.

Bands move with the acceleration stack, not just the card. The Ref2VA VSA port goes out of memory on 12GB cards, so under that stack the same 12GB machine is red, amber only starts at 16,384 MiB and green at 24,576 MiB. Tier-by-tier evidence for each band sits on the VRAM calculator.

The system RAM light

This is the light most machines fail, and the one a GPU spec sheet never warns about. Local video models keep weights and working buffers resident on the host, so the host peak can sit four times higher than the card peak. With pinned memory on, the bands used here come out of measured runs: below 43,587 MiB red, 43,587 to 45,957 MiB still red because it is inside the operating system's margin, 45,958 to 65,535 MiB amber, and 65,536 MiB and up green.

Turning pinned memory off changes the ladder entirely — below 16,384 MiB red, 16,384 to 32,767 MiB amber, 32,768 MiB and up green — because one first-hand report dropped system RAM from 29.8GB to 7.5GB with that single launch flag. The switch is in the form because one flag moves a machine two lights, and pretending there is one ladder would be wrong in both directions.

The CPU light

The CPU light is advisory and never decides the overall verdict on its own. Under 8 logical cores it warns that offloading will run slower than on the 16-thread bench these numbers come from. It does not turn a machine red, because no run in this site's evidence failed on CPU.

Swap, pagefile and the operating-system side

There is no operating-system dropdown, because no measured difference in this site's evidence is attributable to the OS by itself. Two inputs cover that side instead. Swap or pagefile is collected and deliberately not credited: the bench had none, so no recorded run proves that a job which spills into swap finishes rather than crawling or freezing. And Apple silicon is handled as a platform, not a card — unified memory is not split into VRAM and system RAM, so both hardware lights go amber and neither goes green. The only first-hand Apple timing here is an M3 Max at about one hour per second of video.

Why the RAM thresholds matter more than the resolution slider

The usual first instinct when a run dies is to lower the resolution. On the measured evidence that buys time, not memory, which is why the thresholds above are absolute numbers rather than a function of canvas size. A job roughly 40× smaller in pixel-frames moved peak system RAM by 411 MiB — under one percent — while wall time fell by a factor of 46. The memory budget is set by resident weights and working buffers, not by the size of the output.

That is also why the red band is split in two. A 32GB machine and a machine that reaches the peak but eats into the operating system's share are different situations and get different verdicts. The red line is drawn at the highest peak in the whole evidence set, 43,910 MiB, plus a 2,048 MiB margin for the operating system, while the explanatory sentence quotes 43,587 MiB, the peak from this page's own two runs. Two numbers on purpose: the conservative one sets the threshold, the familiar one explains it.

If your machine clears both hardware lights, the bottleneck moves to the workflow rather than the hardware, and the templates on the ComfyUI workflow page are the next step. If it does not, the symptom paths on the ComfyUI troubleshooting page match a failure to a check before you change anything.

MiniMax H3 preset

MiniMax H3 is the first preset in this checker and, so far, the only one with site-measured numbers behind it. Everything from here down to the closing questions is that preset's record, reproduced unchanged: the two runs the thresholds were drawn from, the environment they ran in, and the band table the engine reads.

The short answer

Peak system RAM reached 43,587 MiB on our test machine. A 32GB machine has 32,768 MiB in total, leaving a shortfall of about 10.6GB before the operating system takes its share.

Two runs, 40x apart in workload

Both site-measured workloads used the shared environment listed under Test conditions, including the same official R2V template, Ref2VA pruned INT8 and a fixed seed.

The workload increased by roughly 40x and wall time by roughly 46x, while peak system RAM increased by only 411 MiB, under 1%.

The smoke run rendered 512×288 for 22 frames; the full run rendered 1344×768 for 124 frames. That is 3,244,032 pixel-frames against 127,991,808, a factor of 39.5.

Why lowering resolution does not help

For these measured runs, the memory budget was determined by resident model weights and working buffers rather than output size. Lowering resolution bought time, not memory: the much smaller workload completed sooner without materially changing the system-RAM peak.

Do not treat two points as a curve. These are two measurements from the same configuration, not a basis for broader extrapolation. They do not establish behavior for other model variants, runs with audio enabled, or outputs large enough to exceed VRAM.

Test conditions

• RTX 3060 12GB on physical GPU 0.
• Proxmox VE VM 100 with 16 vCPU, 47.05 GiB RAM and no swap.
• ComfyUI 0.31.0 and PyTorch 2.13.0+cu130.
• Official R2V template with Ref2VA pruned INT8 and a fixed seed.
• The smoke run rendered 512×288 for 22 frames at 24fps; the full run rendered 1344×768 for 124 frames.
• Audio, Turbo LoRA and SageAttention were not enabled.
• System memory was measured from cgroup memory.peak, supported by VmHWM and MemAvailable_min.

Where each line comes from

Every band the checker uses, with its lower bound, its light and the evidence behind it. Bands marked measured come from this site's own run records; bands marked reported come from first-hand posts with the hardware stated.

The same table, as JSON, sits inside this page and is the file the site's estimation engine reads; the checker is one implementation of it, the engine another. Pinned memory decides which system RAM ladder applies because one report moved a machine two lights by turning it off.

Frequently asked questions

Is 32GB of RAM enough to run MiniMax H3 locally?

Not on our test machine. Peak system RAM was 43,587 MiB, while a 32GB system has 32,768 MiB in total. That is a shortfall of about 10.6GB before the operating system takes its share.

Does lowering the resolution reduce MiniMax H3 memory use?

Barely. We ran the same workflow at two sizes about 40 times apart in workload. Wall time went from 55.6 seconds to 2,581.8 seconds, but peak system RAM moved only from 43,176 MiB to 43,587 MiB, a difference under one percent. Lowering resolution buys time, not memory.

How much system RAM should I have for MiniMax H3?

Our runs peaked just under 43GB on a machine with 47.05 GiB available, leaving very little headroom. Anything at or below 32GB was short on every run we measured.

Does MiniMax H3 need 64GB of RAM?

Not strictly. With pinned memory on, every completed run this site has recorded peaked between 42,060 and 43,910 MiB, so a 48GB machine finishes with a few gigabytes to spare and 64GB is the first common size with comfortable headroom. With pinned memory off, one RTX 3090 report dropped system RAM from 29.8GB to 7.5GB, which is why the checker above turns a 32GB machine green in that mode. That flag has not been measured on this site's own bench.

Questions about system requirements for local video models

The answers below are generic to local AI video generation. Every number in them comes from the MiniMax H3 preset above, because that is the only preset with measured data on this site today.

Which spec should I check first, VRAM or system RAM?

Check both, but expect system RAM to be the one that fails. On this bench the card peaked at 11,649 MiB and the host peaked at 43,587 MiB: the machine that owns the card is doing four times as much memory work as the card. A 12GB card is a common, well-documented starting point; a 48GB host is not. That is the order this checker uses — the overall verdict takes the worse of the VRAM and system RAM lights, and the CPU light never decides it alone.

Is a 12GB card enough?

On this site's measured preset, yes, at 1344×768 for 124 frames, with a peak of 11,649 MiB on a 12,288 MiB card. That is 94.8% of the card and leaves 639 MiB, so it is a card that fits rather than a card with room. Under a heavier acceleration stack the same card is red. The per-band evidence is on the VRAM calculator, and the wall times each band produces are on the GPU benchmark page.

Does swap or a pagefile count toward the requirement?

Not in this checker. The bench had no swap, so there is no recorded run proving that a job which spills into swap finishes rather than crawling or freezing. Enter it anyway — the checker reports it back with an explicit caveat instead of quietly folding it into the verdict.

What does an amber light actually mean?

That a run in that band has been recorded as completing, and that nothing in the evidence says it will be pleasant. Amber on system RAM means the bench's own 47.05 GiB machine with no swap: every recorded run finished, peaking at 43,910 MiB at most. Amber on VRAM means cards that produced clips in long cold runs — about 20 minutes for five seconds at 640p on an 8GB RTX 4060 Ti, or 15-second 480p clips on an RTX 5060 with 32GB of system RAM. Amber is a finished run with no margin, not a recommendation.

My whole machine freezes instead of the run failing. Is that a RAM problem?

Usually yes, and it is the clearest signal that the host and not the card is the limit. A CUDA out-of-memory error points at the VRAM light; a freeze, a hard kill, or a reboot with nothing in the log points at the system RAM light. One RTX 3090 report dropped system RAM from 29.8GB to 7.5GB by launching with pinned memory disabled, and an Ubuntu RTX 3060 report stopped whole-machine freezes with the same flag — which is why that switch is an input here and not a footnote. The freeze path on the ComfyUI troubleshooting page walks through it symptom by symptom.