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Arnold GPU supports a set number of Arnold features, including arbitrary shading networks, SSS, hair, atmospherics, instancing, and procedurals. See here for a detailed list of Arnold GPU features and known limitations.

Recommended NVIDIA drivers: 

• Linux 455.38 or higher
• Windows GeForce: 457.30 or higher, Quadro: 457.09 or higher
• macOS is not supported

NVIDIA Driver Downloads

The very first time you render with the GPU, the GPU renderer has to create a cache for the types of shaders and objects used. This can delay the time to the first pixel for your first render. To avoid these one-time delays, we recommend doing some of this in advance by pre-populating the cache before you do any renders as this will fill in the cache with a subset of the most common shader/object combinations. The Arnold plugins (like MtoA) have Pre-Populate GPU Cache menu command, and kick has a -gpu_warm flag. Note that pre-populating the cache can take up to 15 minutes. The cache only needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver, or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system.

Matching noise can take a little experimentation because Arnold GPU uses Camera (AA) sampling only. We recommend you also use Adaptive sampling. Here are some guidelines:

• Set the Max. Camera (AA) in the range of 30 to 50 (depending on the scene, you might go closer to 100). In general, the max samples should be a large value. A large max samples means that the quality is controlled by the noise falling under the threshold, instead of by clamping to the max AA.
• Set the Adaptive Threshold to something like 0.015 or 0.02. For a noise-free render, lower the threshold value, maybe even as far as 0.010.
• Set the Camera (AA) samples to around 3 or 4. One of the few reasons to go higher with AA is for motion blur. The higher the number of Camera (AA) samples, the less of a speedup you'll get from adaptive sampling.

All textures must fit in memory. We recommend you use tiled and mip-mapped TX textures. If you're running out of memory, you can set a maximum resolution for textures in the Render Settings.