Arnold is a ray-tracing renderer program from Autodesk for calculating three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes and has become one of the most widely used rendering programs in professional film production worldwide in recent years. Over 300 leading studios and production houses use Arnold as their standard renderer. Autodesk Arnold is part of Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max as an interactive renderer. From version 6 Arnold is able to use the CPU and GPU for its renderings. Plug-ins are available for the following programs: Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, Katana and Softimage. And iRender Render Farm is a Professional GPU-Acceleration cloud rendering for Arnold projects with Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Katana and so on. The most powerful  server ( 8 x GPU RTX 4090) to offer you the maximum speed for your high-end production renderings.

Arnold GPU rendering has become popular in recent years due to advances in GPU technology and the advent of high-performance graphics cards. GPUs excel at parallel processing, making them ideal for tasks that require large amounts of data to be processed simultaneously.

When using GPU rendering, the main factors that affect performance are the graphics card specifications, such as the number of CUDA cores, clock speed, and memory bandwidth. GPUs with a higher number of CUDA cores, higher clock speeds, and wider memory buses can provide better rendering performance.

Maya Arnold benchmark score from Sir Wade Neistadt

In the Maya Arnold benchmark score from Sir Wade Neistadt, we see that the RTX 5090 – the latest graphics card from NVIDIA is the king. Specifically, its rendering performance is 59% faster than the RTX 4090 and more than 2 times faster than the RTX 3090. But RTX 5090 is very expensive and is in short supply, so it is harder to buy.

Source: cgdirector

In the CGdirector benchmark, the RTX 4090 leads in performance. In addition, the RTX 4080 SUPER has almost the same performance as the RTX 4080 but at a lower price. Moreover, in terms of value, the RTX 4070 SUPER seems to be quite good compared to the rest of the cards.

If you are using Arnold GPU to render scenes, the RTX 4090, RTX 4080 SUPER or RTX 4070 SUPER are the best choices.

Same with the result from many GPU-intensive programs like Redshift, Blender, Arnold also performs so good on RTX4090.

Redshift and Blender only run about 70% faster when compared RTX4090 to RTX 3080Ti, and about 55% faster if you compare RTX4090 to RTX 3090Ti.

The card RTX4090 does a little bit better when rendering in Arnold, the speed is 80% and 64% faster than RTX 3080Ti and RTX 3090Ti relatively.

There is a comparison from TechGage which features RTX 3090. They render two scenes “Jaguar E-Type” and “Sophie” with many graphics cards, using Arnold for Maya MtoA 5.2.1.1. 

In both scenes, RTX 4090 renders faster than RTX 3090 about 75-78%. It’s not quite double like it could do with Octane or V-Ray, judging from the fact that it couldn’t with RTX 3080Ti. However, it’s still a massive reduction in render time. In general, RTX 4090 is still the best graphics card for Arnold in terms of speed, price and availability. 

You’re struggling to render your Arnold projects because your computer just can’t keep up, but you’re not ready to spend a fortune on a new workstation. Turning to a render farm is a smart move. iRender is a leading render farm that fully supports both Arnold CPU and GPU rendering. We give you access to high-performance GPUs, so you can render faster and more efficiently, no need to upgrade your own hardware. All servers are equipped with:

• • • • AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 3955WX (3.9-4.2GHz) or
      • AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 5975WX (3.6-4.5GHz)
      • (1/2/4/6/8x) – RTX 4090
      • 256GB RAM 
      • 2TB NVMe SSDs

iRender – Happy Rendering!