Arnold for Maya 5.4.0

Maya 2025 ships with MtoA 5.4.0, which introduces Arnold 7.3.0.0 core.

This release includes a GPU renderer overhaul using NVIDIA OptiX 8, resulting in numerous performance improvements. Additionally, global light sampling is now supported in volumes, improvements have been made to distance shader in reflections as well as thick curves intersector, and the toon shader now outputs AOVs for direct lighting that have a label in their aov parameter. Finally, a new Overlay imager has been added, allowing you to decorate or tag renders by printing text over the rendered images.

See the Arnold for Maya release notes for the full list of recently added features and bug fixes.

Support for MaterialX shader networks in LookDevX

MtoA 5.4.0 adds support for the new LookDevX MaterialX node graph editor. This allows you to assign LookdevX shader networks to Maya geometry and mix MaterialX shader nodes with Arnold shaders.

Progressive dithered sampling

Arnold now supports dithered samples in progressive and adaptive rendering. Dithering brings nicer noise distributions at low AA sample counts.

GPU Renderer Overhaul

A large part of the GPU renderer was rewritten using NVIDIA OptiX 8. This allowed numerous improvements such as much faster startup times and better scaling on multiple GPUs.
  • Better GPU startup time: The cold cache pre-population time is up to 14x faster than before. This means that the time to first pixel of the first few renders after an Arnold upgrade will now be significantly faster. This overhead is now low enough that we no longer do a cache pre-population step.
  • Better multi-GPU scaling: Render time scaling with multiple GPUs has been improved in scenes with many AOVs. When adding a second GPU, the robot soldier scene with 9 AOVs goes from having just a 1.1x speedup in the previous version of Arnold to a 1.7x speedup in Arnold 7.2.5.
  • Newly supported features on GPU:
    • multiple render sessions.
    • autobump on per-face displacement shaders, previously, autobump would use the first shader applied.
    • motion blur on the sphere primitive.
    • shader parameter on skydome lights.
    • polygons edge type in the wireframe shader.
    • OSL LPE writing via debug closures.
    • image shader file wrap mode.
    • ID mode in utility shader.
    • edgelength mode in utility shader.
    • the GPU texture filtering logic has been improved such that there is a closer match to the CPU renderer.
    • a number of fixes have been made to the GPU color management logic such that there is a closer match to the CPU renderer when rendering multiple sessions with different color management setting.
  • Improved performance: The following production scenes show improved startup time better scaling on multiple GPUs, lower memory usage and faster rendering. The speedups and memory gains are scene dependant and are more visible on scenes with large number of textures.

Global light sampling in volumes

Global light sampling is now supported in volumes. The render time speedup when using global light sampling in volumes depends on the number of lights, but even scenes with only a few lights are faster to render.

Distance shader in reflections

The distance shader now properly handles secondary paths such as reflections.

Overlay imager

A new imager that allows you to decorate or tag your renders by printing text over the rendered images.

Better editor for the overlay imager

The editor for the overlay imager is now more intuitive and previews the chosen font and style.

Improved thick curves intersector

Curves in thick mode are on average 10% faster (in some cases, more than 100% faster) and they look better in closeups.

Toon light-group AOVs

The toon shader now outputs AOVs for direct lighting from lights that have a label in their aov parameter.

More Enhancements

USD Enhancements

Parent topic: What's New in Maya 2025