In general, Arnold is going to work on pretty much any 64-bit system where Houdini, Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, or Katana works. However, there are some minimum requirements:
- 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 10.13 to 10.15. Note that macOS 11 Big Sur is not certified.
- CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
- GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 460.39 or higher drivers on Linux and 461.40 (Quadro), 461.40 (GeForce), or higher on Windows. See Getting Started with Arnold GPU for more information.
- Optix™ denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.