Arnold and V-Ray: Two top render engines of 3Ds Max in 2025

For a long time, 3ds Max has been the industry standard for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. It’s the preferred tool for game production, VFX-heavy movies, and architectural visualization. However, the rendering algorithms that turn raw data into vivid, photorealistic images make its breathtaking 3ds Max outputs so amazing, not simply the models or textures. Whether you’re a VFX artist creating bizarre landscapes or an architect constructing a sunlit atrium, selecting the best 3ds Max render engine will improve your 3D projects. In this blog, iRender will explore two top 3D render engines Arnold and V-Ray, and compare their strengths and ideal use cases to help you decide which is right for your workflow.

Autodesk’s 3ds Max has been the most popular 3D software for many years. Millions of artists use it as their primary tool for computer graphics, from architectural visualizations to game projects and film productions. Even if 3ds Max is more than twenty-five years old, it is still very famous, and many large studios or even smaller teams and individuals have created their whole workflow around it, including the usage of render farms, making the inversion venture almost impossible. Many tools and render engines support 3ds Ma such as Arnold and V-Ray. Additionally, there are substantial 3D libraries that artists can use in their projects, and this is something that you can’t change easily.

Arnold and V-Ray are two of the most popular render engines for 3Ds Max, a powerful 3D modeling and animation software. Both engines are widely used in the film, architecture, and product visualization industries.

Arnold is a physically-based renderer developed by Solid Angle, while V-Ray is a commercial rendering engine developed by Chaos Group. Both engines offer advanced features such as realistic lighting, global illumination, and realistic materials. In 2025, both Arnold and V-Ray continue to be top choices for rendering in 3Ds Max, offering high-quality results and advanced features to meet the demands of modern 3D projects.

Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects movies. This beginner’s tutorial introduces MAXtoA, a plug-in that allows you to use the Arnold renderer directly in Autodesk 3Ds Max.

Arnold has grown to be a rendering behemoth for 3ds Max and is frequently used for visual effects in popular movies. For example, many films and TV Series have used Arnold, such as Alice in Wonderland, Thor, Captain America, X-Men, Elysium, Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Game of Thrones, and others.

For 3ds Max rendering, Autodesk’s default option is Arnold, which is renowned for its production-ready quality and ease of use. Excellent ray tracing from the engine easily yields photorealistic effects. Creating realistic 3ds Max renders requires correct light simulation, which is ensured by its physically based rendering technology. Arnold’s progressive rendering function, which offers real-time feedback while rendering and is perfect for iterative processes, is one of its greatest advantages.

The key features of Arnold are:

• Advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing that accurately simulates light dynamics.
• Efficient memory management allows for rendering of scenes with a vast number of objects and textures.
• Supports volumetric rendering which is perfect for effects like fog, smoke, and clouds.

V-Ray for 3Ds Max is a production-proven rendering software. Known for its versatility and ability to handle any type of project — from massive, dynamic scenes having thousands of lights to a sublime still life — it is the go-to solution for artists and designers across 3D industries.

On the 3Ds Max rendering scene, V-Ray is one of the most widely used and adaptable render engines. With the ideal ratio of performance, adaptability, and visual fidelity, it has been a mainstay in the field for more than 20 years. From high-end VFX and motion graphics to 3Ds rendering for architecture, V-Ray excels in producing breathtaking outcomes in a variety of fields. V-Ray’s hybrid rendering mode lets users smoothly swap between CPU and GPU rendering, while features like global illumination guarantee precise lighting. V-Ray is a rendering engine that uses global illumination algorithms, including path tracing, photon mapping, irradiance maps, and directly computed global illumination.

For truly photorealistic renders, you want a raytracer that’s built for quality, optimized for speed, and ready to scale. V-Ray gives you the power to work with lightning-fast interactive and heavyweight production rendering—all while getting the most from your CPU and GPU hardware. When you’re working with the biggest scene you’ve ever seen, you need a renderer that won’t let you down. Billions of polygons? Thousands of lights? V-Ray can handle it all. Render anything and everything with V-Ray. Adaptive Lights, Proxy Objects, Distributed Rendering — an arsenal of production-proven features when you need them.

V-Ray is compatible with all the most popular 3ds Max plugins — Substance, Forest Pack, Railclone, Ornatrix, Tyflow, Phoenix, and more. V-Ray is also the perfect fit for any pipeline with support for open standards such as Alembic, OSL, OpenColorIO, and now ACEScg. Plus, it works seamlessly with data from other Chaos products like Enscape.

Key features:

• Powerful ray tracing capabilities, which provide realistic lighting and shadows.
• Extensive material and texture library, making it easier to achieve photo-realism without extensive setup.
• Versatile, with options for both CPU and GPU rendering.

Real-time technology and GPU rendering developments are changing workflows, and the 3D rendering industry is changing quickly. Choosing the right 3d render engine for your project ensures that you achieve the best results, whether you’re focused on archviz, animation, or cinematic storytelling. You can choose the ideal render engine for your needs by testing with the strengths of each of these top engines. The choice of render engine can dramatically impact the quality and efficiency of projects created in 3ds Max. Arnold and V-Ray remain industry leaders, offering a balance of speed, quality, and versatility. Therefore, both of them enables you to push the envelope of what’s feasible. 

Our service

iRender is a perfect option to render projects in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, and VFX with over 30.000 customers. To bring the best experiences for customers, iRender has been improving the quality and updating the newest technology every day. We provide high-configuration dedicated servers (physical computers/machines) specifically optimized for GPU rendering.

You can install 3ds Max with these plugins on our remote machine then add license, and render with any render engines, such as V-Ray, Arnold, etc.

Thanks to top-tier GPUs and CPUs, iRender has been able to provide high-end computing services by constructing a solid infrastructure. Our goal is to be the top cloud computing service provider for a variety of applications, including AI/Big Data services for machine learning, gaming, simulation acceleration, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).

For Arnold and V-Ray for 3Ds Max, we suggest our multiple GPUs servers 2/4/6/8 x RTX 4090s/3090s. You can see their configuration and choose the suitable server following:

Let’s check performance of our server when render V-Ray for 3ds Max scene.