exactly. I've worked with C4D in the past. this is even possible on an i3 with 2.6 GHz, 8gm ram, onboard graca. if you know what it looks like afterwards, you can work quite fluently. But if you use a lot of effects, hair or complex textures, looking at them while working can take forever. if you want to render it out you can do that overnight and let it run for hours. so simple tasks can be solved with weak computers, but if you want to do more complex things then you quickly lose the desire and you need something faster. with C4D you mainly need cpu cores and ghz, less the graphics card. it will probably be similar with cad. But here you should pay close attention to which program uses which hardware/software most. (such as opengl or cuda/cpu or gpu/)
depending on what you use for a cad/3d program, you have to differentiate between work view and export. When you export, you render the finished animation as a clip out of the program and that takes a long time. but if you want to see what you are doing at work, there is usually a work renderer with a "quick view". here you can often change the view and you can, for example, only display the structure without the textures, which is then faster...
and in general:
two eggs that move a little and change shape = CPU
two hairy eggs with 20,000 hair pieces that all move individually, have shadows and reflect light = GPU + CPU
just try it and maybe try different software.