Arnold GPU on NVIDIA RTX

RTX GPU Arnold

Autodesk has announced the release of Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU RTX rendering to provide powerful new levels of responsiveness. The latest releases of Maya 2020 and Arnold 6 are shipping today, December 10. They contain new features such as RTX-accelerated ray tracing and AI-powered denoising.

Autodesk built Arnold GPU based on NVIDIA’s OptiX framework to take advantage of NVIDIA RTX’s RT Cores for dedicated ray tracing and Tensor Cores for AI denoising.

NVIDIA is also releasing a new Studio Driver to support these new updates to Arnold and Maya RTX interactivity and acceleration in final frame renders.

Maya Arnold 6 GPU render, courtesy of Lee Griggs

“We’ve worked closely with NVIDIA to optimize Arnold GPU to run on the latest RTX GPUs and RTX Server, and we’re excited to get this latest update into the hands of new and existing Arnold customers,” said Chris Vienneau, senior director of Media & Entertainment Products at Autodesk.

Arnold 6 GPU render from Maya showing denoise

With the new updates, rendering with NVIDIA RTX GPUs is multiple times faster than a typical dual-CPU rendering server. “Speed and interactivity have become more crucial than ever to the creative process,” said Vienneau. “Arnold 6 delivers performance gains that will help lighten the load with the same high-quality render results that the CPU renderer is known for.”

Autodesk Arnold 6 new features include: 

  • A unified renderer that allows users to switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering.
  • Support for OSL, OpenVDB volumes, on-demand texture loading, most LPEs, lights, shaders, and all cameras.
  • New USD components like hydra render delegate, Arnold USD procedural, and USD schemas for Arnold nodes and properties, which are now available on GitHub.
  • Several performance improvements to help maximize efficiency, including faster-creased subdivisions, an improved Physical Sky shader, and dielectric microfacet multiple scattering.
  • Bifrost for Maya: Significant performance improvements, Cached Playback support, and new MPM cloth constraints.
Arnold 6 GPU render from Maya using OpenVDB volumes.

Maya 2020

Autodesk Maya 2020, is also now also available with new GPU-accelerated features:

  • GPU caching of ncloth and nparticles enables smooth, real-time playback of animations without the need for playblasts or skipped frames.
  • New Proximity Wrap deformer joins a family of GPU-accelerated deformers to make it simpler to model deformations in materials such as cloth and muscle systems.

Arnold GPU is available to try with a free 30-day trial of Arnold 6. Arnold GPU is available in all supported plug-ins for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana. For more information

Arnold 6 GPU rendering with OSL Shaders