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Automatic file path remapping: String parameter values can now be automatically modified according to the OS Arnold is running on. For example, this is useful when the artist workstations are running Windows but the renderfarm nodes are running Linux. Configuration is done with a JSON file that contains the strings to search and replace for each OS. This configuration file can be selected through the ARNOLD_PATHMAP environment variable.  (#9311)  For example:

{
    "windows":
    {
       "this_path/": "some/other_path/windows/"
    },
    
    "mac":
    {
      "this_path/": "some/other_path/mac/"
    },
    
    "linux":
    {
      "this_path/": "some/other_path/linux/"
    }
}

Rim light control for the Toon shader: A new rim_light_tint float parameter was added to the toon shader to tint the color of the rim light using the base color of the surface. See the full documentation. (#9003)

Performance improvements on Windows with many cores and texture-heavy scenes: Several performance improvements have been made, particularly for those running Windows, using many cores, tiff based textures, and/or reading many textures/sec. Expected speedups can be anywhere from a few percent to orders of magnitude faster on many-core Windows machines. (#9515, #9685, #9686, #9695, #9709, #9761) For a medium complexity scene that uses exr based .tx textures we get the following speedups on Windows :

CPU	Arnold 6.0.3.0	Arnold 6.0.4.0	Speedup
AMD 3970X (64 threads)	439s	397s	1.11x
AMD 3990X (128 threads)	379s	267s	1.42x
AMD 3995WX (128 threads)	351s	276s	1.27x
Intel Xeon 8280 x 2 (112 threads)	356s	337s	1.06x
Intel i9-9980XE (36 threads)	748s	720s	1.04x

For a texture heavy stress scene (8GB of tiff based .tx texture tiles end up being read in) we get the following speedups on Windows: