


We’ve found that it’s generally easy to get great results with the GPU renderer, although whether or not you want to give Arnold GPU a try today will depend on your willingness to beta test, and your hardware. Our overall impressions so far definitely give the nod to GPUs. Once the GPU renderer evolves, those comparisons might become easier. We originally wanted to compare performance between CPU and GPU directly, but due to some key differences, such as certain sampling sliders being disabled, we couldn’t get what we felt to be accurate apples-to-apples results. In the bullet list above, settings are suggested for obtaining similar noise results from the GPU as the CPU. Autodesk has noted that more support will be released over time. That doesn’t mean that basic features like subsurface scattering are disabled it just can’t be controlled via this slider. The main thing to note is that when selecting the GPU as the rendering device, Arnold will disable the sliders for every sampling type aside from Camera (AA).

While there are some options disabled with Arnold GPU for the time-being, the overall UI thankfully remains the same (at least in Maya and 3ds Max). In some renderers, changing between the CPU and GPU might reflect a change to the UI, since options may differ between them. There is no hybrid rendering (CPU+GPU) option.There is no AMD Radeon support with Arnold GPU.NVIDIA GeForce/Quadro driver 419.67+ required.Best performance will be seen after using the ‘Pre-populate GPU Cache’ utility.Arnold GPU (currently) uses only Camera AA sampling.Here are some important things to bear in mind: First is the release notes for the 3.2 release, as well as “ Getting Started With Arnold GPU“. If you’d like to jump aboard the Arnold GPU train, we’d recommend reading through a couple of pages.
