BakeNShake is compatible with Cinema R21 or greater.
Currently win only, but there will be a mac build after the initial windows release.
Requires a 64 bit CPU, lots of system RAM, and lots of GPU RAM.
By the nature of what it does, BakeNShake requires as much RAM as you can give it.
depending on what you are baking, this plugin can easily consume all of your ram, in seconds.
i.e. if you are trying to bake 300 frames of an object which has 10 million polygons, you have to be able to hold 300 x 4 million polygons in your RAM.
ShakeNBake trades RAM, for speed. if your animation is struggling, and you are getting crippling frame rates in the viewport, it can easily take you from 1 fps, to 200 fps, if you have the RAM to hold the animation, and you have a GPU which is has the capacity to deal with it.
Your GPU determines the how fast the cache plays back. We try to store everything in RAM, and upload it to your GPU. If your GPU runs out of RAM, you have up to 64 GB of potential shared RAM, which will swap as fast as it can. A modern GPU with pci4, will do a very good job of swapping, but if you try to keep your cache within the bounds of the RAM your GPU has, your frame rates will be higher.
BakeNShake requires lots of RAM, and a fast GPU. it does not need a fast CPU, and the number of threads your CPU has does not matter. Once you have everything in RAM, and you GPU is populated, the plugin requires very little resources to manage the cache.
important : There is no point in using it if you have just 8 GB of RAM or less. I would recommend at least 16GB of ram, better is 32GB, 64GB or greater. your GPU should have at least 8GB of RAM available to it, you might get away with less, but more is better. If a baked cache does not fit in RAM you are not going to be able to use it. Common sense applies.