System requirements
What you need to run DNA smoothly — and which features only work on certain machines.
DNA is a real-time, GPU-driven app. The single most important thing is a reasonably modern graphics card. Beyond that, the experience is best on macOS today, very good in a WebGPU browser, and workable on Windows and Linux.
The essentials
A modern GPU. DNA does almost all of its work — viewport, simulation, rendering, compositing — on the graphics card. Any reasonably recent integrated or discrete GPU works; older hardware without modern graphics support will struggle or refuse to start.
macOS gives the fullest, best-tested experience. DNA runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs and uses Metal under the hood.
A WebGPU browser runs the Web Player and web exports. WebGPU is the technology DNA relies on in the browser, so you'll want a current version of a browser that supports it.
On Mac, Apple Silicon machines unlock the most — including hardware-accelerated ray tracing for certain renderer features. See the macOS-only list below.
Where DNA runs
DNA's home platform is macOS, and that's where every feature is exercised first. Other platforms run a slightly reduced set of features.
macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) — the primary platform. Everything described in these docs is available here.
Windows and Linux — DNA runs, with a few platform-specific features turned off (see below). These platforms get less day-to-day testing than macOS.
Web (browser) — the Web Player and exported web projects run wherever WebGPU is available.
Windows and Linux support is best-effort and less heavily tested than macOS. If something behaves differently there than the docs describe, it's worth checking the macOS-only list before assuming a bug.
What's macOS-only
A handful of features rely on Apple technologies and are only available on a Mac. If a node needs one of these and you're on another platform, the node still appears in the graph — it just reports that the feature isn't available here and stays disabled, rather than silently doing nothing.
Syphon — sharing video frames live with other Mac apps (in and out). See Outputs.
Apple Vision pose, hand, and face detection — the camera-based body/hand/face tracking used by Vision & ML.
Screen capture — grabbing another window or your screen as a live input.
CoreML acceleration for machine-learning models, and hardware ray tracing, which additionally needs an Apple Silicon Mac.
NDI and Syphon as live outputs, and several other live-I/O paths, are Mac-centric. If you build a project around them on macOS and then move it to Windows, Linux, or the Web Player, those specific nodes will report that they're unavailable. Plan your live setup around the machine you'll actually perform on.
The Web Player's limits
The browser version is real and runs the full visual engine through WebGPU, but it isn't a full replacement for the desktop app:
No audio output in the Web Player.
No native live input or output — MIDI, OSC, NDI, Syphon and similar hardware/app I/O are desktop features.
Some heavyweight export and compression paths are desktop-only.
For live performance and audio work, use the desktop app and the DNA Player.