
Arnold
Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures.
Hardware Recommendations
Processor
Rendering
Arnold is a GPU-based rendering application, therefore we recommend a higher performance graphics card.
Graphics
NVIDIA Quadro A5000 or A6000. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3080Ti, or RTX 3090.
Storage
We recommend having two solid-state drives which provides the best performance:
- Primary Drive: SSD for the operating system and applications
- Secondary Drive: SSD for active projects; a dedicated SSD will offer optimal performance
2.5-inch SATA SSD performs at ~500MB/s
M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD performs at ~2500MB/s
For long term storage or backup, infrequently accessed files, we recommend a 4TB to 18TB hard drive. Hard drives also work well for storing export files as the export/rendering process is generally not write intensive.
Memory
In general, 3-6GB of RAM per CPU core is recommended. For example, if you select a single 12-core processor, 32GB will suffice for basic tasks or 64GB for more demanding workloads.
Configuration Recommendations
HP Z8 G4 Workstation
$13,075
HP Z8 G4 Workstation
$9,575
HP Z840 Workstation
$5,050
HP Z840 Workstation
$3,500
HP Z6 G4 Workstation
$6,500
HP Z4 G4 Workstation
$3,300
Recommended Hardware References
- by
Arnold Renderer
Getting Started With Arnold GPU - Dec 10, 2019 by
Broadcasting+Cable
Autodesk Arnold 6 Offers Production Rendering on Both CPU and GPU - Mar 20, 2019 by
Greyscalegorilla
What to Know About Autodesk’s Arnold GPU Render Engine
Running additional applications on this system?
The recommended components and configurations provided on this page are specific to this software. If you plan on running other applications, please view our recommendations for them as well and choose a configuration that best suits the needs of the application requirements collectively. Feel free to contact us for further assistance.