High-speed, Powerful Cloud Render Farm For Arnold GPU

Arnold is one of the most widely used photorealistic rendering systems in computer graphics worldwide, especially in animation and VFX for film and TV. It is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Starting from a CPU-based renderer, since March 2019, Autodesk launched Arnold 5.3 with Arnold GPU in a public beta. Now, not only is Arnold GPU easily switched between CPU and GPU rendering, but it also supports GPU acceleration – up to 8 GPUs, bringing the power and flexibility of CPU and GPU rendering in a single renderer to artists in the world.

In this article, we will explore with you the powerful cloud rendering for Arnold GPU.

Arnold GPU is available in all supported plug-ins: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. For the hardware, Arnold GPU users can easily choose their machine configuration with the minimum system requirements as below:

1. Operating system

Arnold GPU is supported on:

• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
• MacOS is not supported.

2. Hardware specifications

– CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.

– GPU:

Arnold GPU works on NVIDIA GPUs of the Turing, Volta, Pascal, and Maxwell architectures. For best performance, Arnold recommends using Ampere or Turing GPUs with RTX, also recommend Volta (Titan V, Quadro GV100), or Pascal (GeForce 10xx, Quadro Pxxx) GPUs. Maxwell GPUs (GeForce 9xx, Quadro Mxxx) are also supported. Generally, any GPU based on the Maxwell architecture or newer (Pascal, Volta, Turing, Ampere…) will work with Arnold if paired with new enough NVIDIA drivers. You can see the full list of supported GPUs.

– NVIDIA drivers:

• Linux 460.32.03 or higher
• Windows GeForce: 461.09 or higher, Quadro: 461.09 or higher

As the system requirements of Arnold GPU above, iRender is one of cloud render farm for Arnold GPU, we provides GPU cloud rendering packages with 1/2/4/6 card(s) RTX 2080Ti/3080/3090, which suit all your project demands and will speed up your rendering process many times.

Let’s watch a video on using the iRender server (4x GPU RTX 3090) to make rendering with Arnold for Maya a breeze.

And Arnold for Houdini with iRender server (4x GPU RTX 3090).

1. The hardware configuration not only meets the recommended system requirements but also provide high-end options:

• From version 5.3 beta, Arnold supports multiple GPUs and is optimized to use Ampere or Turing GPUs with RTX. iRender provides many cloud rendering servers with a single card (1 x RTX 3090), double cards (2 x RTX 3090), four cards (4 xRTX3090) and six cards (6 x RTX 2080Ti/6 x RTX 3080/6 x RTX 3090). GPU Architectures are Ampere and Turing, all graphic cards are NVIDIA RTX series: RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 – the most powerful graphic card currently. Therefore, Arnold GPU users easily choose suitable, optimized configurations to accommodate their project demands.
• iRender’s packages have vRAM capacity from 10 GB to 24 GB, fitting to the heaviest scene and textures. If your jobs need higher vRAM, we provide NVLink/SLI service, when requested, to connect multiple GPUs to share memory. So you don’t have to worry that your entire scene will not fit in memory limit.
• Depending on each package, RAM capacity is 128 GB or 256 GB.
• Arnold GPU users can flexibly switch between rendering on the CPU or GPU with a single click without changing renderers. Besides, compared to CPU renders, GPU renders have unsupported features and limitations. For example, Mipmap bias, Light linking, Trace sets, Custom shaders, cameras, filters, BSDFs, Noice are not supported, while OSL, OpenVDB, Volume displacement, etc currently have some limitations. So CPU is one of the criteria that can not be ignored. There are 2 types of CPU on iRender GPU Cloud Render Farm: Intel Xeon W-2245 and Dual Xeon E5-2673 v3. Intel Xeon W-2245 has a high clock speed 3.90GHz, whereas, Dual Xeon E5-2673 v3 has 12 Cores and 24 Threads, they both meet all requirements from Arnold.
• In terms of the operating system, iRender currently provides services with two operating systems: 64-bit Windows 10 and 64-bit distribution Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS with glibc 2.27, ensuring the recommended operating system that Arnold offers.

2. iRender provides high-end configuration at a reasonable price. You can see that iRender’s packages always cost much cheaper than packages of other render farms (in performance/price ratio). Moreover, iRender’s clients will enjoy many attractive promotions and discounts. For example, this July, we offer a discounted price for GPU server 3, GPU server 4, and GPU server 8, users will take advantage of these to level up their renders.

3. To reduce the rendering time more, users can run multiple machines at the same time. You can use the machines separately or connect them by using Thinkbox Deadline. iRender provides Thinkbox Deadline license for Prime customers. Users, who recharge enough points to become Prime customers, will not only be able to use Thinkbox Deadline license without usage or maintenance costs, but also enjoy a lot of exclusive benefits.

4. For Arnold GPU users with large-scale projects, iRender offers the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly Fixed Rental package, which saves you up to 50% of the cost compared to the hourly rental. Please read more about our Fixed rental service here.

5. In addition, users can request extra services to make full use of iRender servers, for example, expand image threshold, increase the size of network drive (Z:), open port, install NVLink, and change hardware. Surprisingly, you get all of these services for free.

With all the outstanding advantages mentioned above, you must have found yourself the perfect choice of cloud render farm for Arnold GPU renderer. We believe together with Arnold, our GPU accelerated servers will bring greater interactivity and speed to artist workflows. What Arnold GPU users can get from iRender is not only the best quality products but also the high security and the most comfortable render time.

So, do not hesitate anymore, let’s register for an account today to get a FREE COUPON to experience our service and reach a new level of cloud rendering.

Thank you & Happy Rendering!