Arnold GPU

Supported Features

Arnold GPU supports a set number of Arnold features, including arbitrary shading networks, SSS, hair, atmospherics, instancing, and procedurals. See here for a detailed list of Arnold GPU features and known limitations.

System Requirements

Arnold GPU works on NVIDIA GPUs with the Maxwell architecture or later. Multiple GPUs will improve performance.

• See the full list of supported GPUs.

• See the Arnold system requirements for the recommended drivers.

Selecting a Render Device

You can easily switch between CPU and GPU with a single click. You'll find a new Render Device setting in the Render Settings > System section in the Arnold plugins.

You can use CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES (environment variable) to limit which GPUs Arnold (and any other CUDA-based application) can see.

Matching Noise on CPU and GPU

Matching noise can take a little experimentation because Arnold GPU uses Camera (AA) sampling only. We recommend you also use Adaptive sampling. Here are some guidelines:

• Set the Max. Camera (AA) in the range of 30 to 50 (depending on the scene, you might go closer to 100). In general, the max samples should be a large value. A large max samples means that the quality is controlled by the noise falling under the threshold, instead of by clamping to the max AA.
• Set the Adaptive Threshold to something like 0.015 or 0.02. For a noise-free render, lower the threshold value, maybe even as far as 0.010.
• Set the Camera (AA) samples to around 3 or 4. One of the few reasons to go higher with AA is for motion blur. The higher the number of Camera (AA) samples, the less of a speedup you'll get from adaptive sampling.