System requirements
What DNA needs to run, and which features are limited to certain machines.
DNA is real-time and GPU-driven. The graphics card matters more than anything else in the machine.
The essentials
A modern GPU. Viewport, simulation, rendering and compositing all run on the graphics card. Any reasonably recent integrated or discrete GPU works. Without one the app fails at startup rather than falling back to software.
macOS is the best-tested platform. DNA runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, on Metal.
A WebGPU browser runs web exports. Use a current version of a browser with WebGPU support.
Platforms
macOS is the primary platform, and everything described in these docs is available there. Windows and Linux run with a few platform-specific features turned off, listed below. In the browser, an exported project runs wherever WebGPU is available.
Windows and Linux support is best-effort and less heavily tested than macOS. Check the macOS-only list below before treating a difference from the docs as a bug.
macOS-only features
Syphon, in and out, for sharing video frames live with other Mac apps. See Outputs. The Windows equivalent is present in the source but not implemented, so live texture sharing between applications is a Mac feature in practice.
Screen capture: another window or your screen as a live input. Needs macOS 12.3 or newer and Screen Recording permission.
The Apple Vision analysis nodes: pose, segmentation, image analysis, text recognition and the Vision tracker.
CoreML acceleration for machine-learning models. This is a speed path rather than a gate: without it the same models run through ONNX Runtime.
Body, hand and face tracking are not in this list. Body Tracking runs its models through ONNX Runtime on every platform, and CoreML only makes it faster on a Mac.
The motion-analysis nodes are not in this list either. Optical Flow, Motion Field and Structure Tensor are ordinary GPU texture work with no model file behind them, so they run on every platform, the browser included.
Hardware ray tracing is not in this list either. It is switched on by asking the graphics card whether it supports ray queries, and a card that does not gets a software fallback with no change to the graph. In practice that means Apple Silicon today, but it is a capability check rather than a rule about Macs.
A node whose platform feature is missing still appears in the graph and still cooks. It does not raise an error or grey itself out. It emits an empty image and puts a line such as Syphon only available on macOS on its error output, which you have to wire up or inspect to see. Plan a live setup around the machine you will perform on.
Browser limits
A web export carries the same visual engine, compiled to WebAssembly and running through WebGPU. It is not a full replacement for the desktop app:
No audio output.
No live input or output. MIDI, OSC, NDI, Syphon and comparable hardware and app I/O are desktop features.
No physics. The simulation nodes report the operation as unsupported rather than solving.
No machine learning. The Apple Vision nodes and the model-driven trackers, Point Tracker and Blob Tracker, are compiled out of a browser build, so they are absent from the palette rather than failing at cook time. A node that reaches the inference runtime some other way, Body Tracking among them, is in the palette and reports the operation as unavailable instead of running a model.
Bundles are written uncompressed, and some export and compression paths are desktop-only.
For live performance and audio work, use the desktop app and the DNA Player.