Puget Systems

06/23/2026

AMD’s 9070 GRE is a great gaming GPU. For professional content creation, the picture is more complicated.

That’s really the cleanest way to sum up our testing. The card has some real wins in workflows that matter, but it also has some hard limits that make it a tougher recommendation if your team is doing more than gaming or light creative work.

Where it stands out:
🔹 In Unreal Engine, the 9070 GRE was 18% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti in our benchmark. That’s a meaningful result for teams working in real-time production, especially when rasterized rendering is the focus.

🔹 In Premiere, it performed well in LongGOP workflows and was generally competitive in the codec areas where AMD’s media engine has improved.

Where it falls short:
🔹 In After Effects 3D, the 9070 GRE was 28% slower than the RTX 5060 Ti. That’s the kind of gap that changes how a system feels for motion graphics users.

🔹 In Blender, it was actually beaten by the Intel Arc B580, which is not where a midrange Radeon card wants to be.

That tension is what makes the 9070 GRE interesting. On paper, 12GB of VRAM and a $550 MSRP put it in a tempting middle ground. In practice, the card’s value depends heavily on whether you care more about gaming performance, real-time rendering, or Adobe workflows that lean harder on CUDA and mature ecosystem support.

If you’re building for Unreal Engine, this card has a case. If you’re building for Blender, After Effects 3D, or broader professional content creation, the tradeoffs get a lot harder to ignore.

We tested the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE in professional content creation applications, evaluating based on both MSRP and current market pricing.

06/18/2026

We’re here at Unreal Fest with SoKrispyMedia, demoing their new Chalk Warfare game! Hand-draw your weapon and see their custom trained machine learning model, powered by NVIDIA Blackwell RTX 6000 Max-Q GPUs, analyze your drawing in real time; analyzing the grip, the scope, the magazine placement, the recoil and drop a fully functional weapon in your hands inside the game.

If you’ve been meaning to come by, today’s the day!

06/16/2026

NVIDIA Game Developer just announced the ACE Game Agent SDK and a new suite of Unreal Engine 5 plugins at Unreal Fest 2026 and the Chalk Warfare game from SoKrispyMedia gets a shoutout too!

06/15/2026

We're at Unreal Fest in Chicago this week and we brought something you've never seen in a video game before.

SoKrispyMedia is officially launching Chalk Warfare at the our booth, and the game has one feature that simply doesn't exist anywhere else: players draw their weapon by hand and it's pulled into the game in real time using machine learning that accounts for magazine placement, grip, recoil, reload, and scope functionality.

The models powering that experience were trained on Puget Systems workstations. At the show, attendees will see both sides of it live; the backend AI interpreting the drawing, and the weapon appearing in-game within seconds.

Special guest and celebrity voice actor Carolina Ravassa will be at the booth for the launch. Attendees will also get hands-on time with the game running on Puget Systems Mobile Workstations!

The team behind the game includes a dozen producers and artists from major AAA studios all building something their 3M+ YouTube subscribers have been asking for. You don't want to miss this exciting event!

Shout out to Epic Games and Unreal Engine for helping make this possible!

Puget Systems Returns to Unreal Fest 2026 and Teams Up with SOKRISPYMEDIA to Debut Chalk Warfare Video Game

06/15/2026

What happens when 350 million YouTube views inspire a video game? You need serious hardware to build it.

SoKrispyMedia, the studio behind the viral Chalk Warfare series and major projects like HBO's The Last of Us, Epic Games, Mr. Beast, and Red Bull, is developing a full-scale Chalk Warfare video game. And the most ambitious feature in it doesn't exist anywhere else on the market: players can hand-draw their weapon of choice and have it integrated into the game in real time using AI.

That's not a re-skin. It's a bespoke machine learning model trained on hundreds of weapon types; accounting for how each weapon is held, fired, recoiled, and reloaded all completing within seconds of the player drawing.

Training that model required serious compute. Puget Systems designed a workstation specifically for SOKRISPYMEDIA, built around:

🔹 AMD Threadripper PRO 9975WX
🔹 2x NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q — 192GB combined VRAM
🔹 256GB DDR5-6400 ECC RAM
🔹 Dual Crucial T710 Gen5 NVMe SSDs

The result: the entire AI training pipeline ran locally, without expensive cloud processing. Nearly 200GB of GPU memory, attached to two of the most powerful workstation GPUs ever built, made it possible.

As Sam Wickert, Founder and Creative Director of SOKRISPYMEDIA, put it:

"We've really become accustomed to using real-time rendering to do graphics in 2D film, but we realized that there is something beautiful about game development and content creation — it's a medium for creating cross-over experiences."

This is the case study we've been excited to share. Full story at the link in the comments.

06/11/2026

We've built benchmarks for Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and more. Yesterday we launched one that's been a long time coming: Puget Bench for Unreal Engine.

The challenge with benchmarking UE is that no two users are doing the same thing. A game dev building an open world stresses hardware completely differently than a virtual production studio rendering cinematic content in real time even though they're both using the same engine.

So we built around real workflows:
🔧 Shader compilation
🖥️ Viewport performance
🎬 Movie Render Queue output
📦 Asset processing
💡 Lighting builds

The goal isn't a flashy score; it's data that tells you exactly what to upgrade to improve your specific workflow.

Read the full blog post and join the beta program below.
And if you're heading to Unreal Fest in Chicago next week, come find us! We'll be showing this off live!

06/08/2026

We're heading to Unreal Fest in Chicago next week (June 16–18), and before we get on the floor we wanted to share what we've actually learned from years of benchmarking and building workstations for Unreal Engine 5.

Because the answer to "What does a good UE5 workstation need?" is: It depends on your role. And that distinction matters a lot more than most spec sheets let on.

For artists and environment creators, the GPU is the most important call.

Modern UE5 workflows are VRAM-hungry. High-resolution textures, Nanite-dense scenes, hardware ray tracing, and Lumen lighting all lean heavily on the GPU. We're recommending the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 as a strong all-around option, with the RTX 5090 stepping in when you're pushing VR content or particularly dense scenes that need every bit of that 32GB buffer. CPU requirements are more modest in this role. Intel Core Ultra performs well here for editor responsiveness and occasional shader builds, without overbuying on platform cost.

For programmers and technical artists, the CPU is the bottleneck.

Unreal Engine and Visual Studio shader compilation scales extremely well with core count and for developers who compile frequently throughout the day, that time adds up fast. AMD Threadripper (non-PRO) chips dramatically reduce compile times compared to mainstream desktop processors, and fully populating the memory channels is just as important: 128–256GB of RAM is common for this workload because shader compiles, large editor sessions, and parallel tooling consume a lot.

For ICVFX and virtual production, you're in a different category entirely.

At that level, the GPU becomes even more critical. AMD Threadripper PRO 9000WX series leads for the most demanding VP workflows, and the GPU recommendation moves to NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96GB of VRAM for dense UE5 scenes running alongside multi-application workflows that push well past 62GB. This is a platform decision, not just a component choice.

The RAM and storage rules that apply everywhere:
- 32GB minimum for most users, 64GB+ if you're building lighting that runs for hours
- Two-drive setup at minimum: fast NVMe for OS and software, separate NVMe for active project files
- A third storage drive for long-term archival; cheap per GB, keeps your fast drives uncluttered

06/03/2026

Is AI just a bubble?

Maybe but if your team is actually using AI to get work done, the more important question is whether you have enough compute to keep up.

In this article Dustin makes the case that AI is becoming a new layer of compute, and the bottleneck is moving from the model itself to the machine running it. That matters a lot once your workflows need privacy, low latency, and serious VRAM.

Read more:

GTC was intense, and there is a massive debate raging right now: Is AI a bubble? Is Jensen just a shovel salesman? Or are we looking at the new bedrock?

06/02/2026

The Intel Arc Pro B70 is a good example of why GPU buying decisions should start with the workload.

If you need a strong all-around pro GPU for apps like Premiere, After Effects, or Revit, there are better options. But if you need lots of VRAM for AI inference and local model work, the B70’s 32GB of VRAM starts to look very appealing.

Full review:

How does Intel's new Arc Pro B70 32GB professional GPU stack up against the competition in media editing, rendering, AI, CAD, and BIM applications?

05/29/2026

The Intel Arc Pro B70 is a reminder that not every GPU is built to do the same job.

The B70 brings something interesting to the table: 32GB of VRAM at a price that makes multi-GPU AI workstations more realistic. That matters if your team is trying to run larger models locally or reduce cloud dependency.

In traditional creative and engineering apps, the B70 is more mixed. It’s fine in some workflows, competitive in others, and not the right choice if you need the strongest all-around GPU for Premiere, After Effects, or Revit. But if your priority is AI inference and memory capacity, that changes the conversation.

That’s the real benefit: this card gives teams another way to build for local AI without jumping straight to the most expensive options.

Full review:

How does Intel's new Arc Pro B70 32GB professional GPU stack up against the competition in media editing, rendering, AI, CAD, and BIM applications?