Its ray tracing engine is optimized to send billions of spatially incoherent rays throughout a 3D scene composed of geometric primitives including polygons, hair splines, and volumes.

Since March 2019 it supports Nvidia RTX-powered GPUs through the use of OptiX.

Originally written in C99 and progressively rewritten in C++, Arnold runs natively on x86 CPUs, where it tries to take advantage of all available threads and SIMD lanes for optimal parallelism. Notable television series include Game of Thrones, Westworld, Trollhunters, LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS and The Mandalorian. Notable feature films that have used Arnold include Monster House, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Alice in Wonderland, Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class, The Avengers, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Elysium, Pacific Rim, Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Created in Spain by Marcos Fajardo and later co-developed by his company Solid Angle SL (now owned by Autodesk) and Sony Pictures Imageworks, Arnold is one of the most widely used photorealistic rendering systems in computer graphics worldwide, particularly in animation and VFX for film and TV.

Arnold is a computer program for rendering three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes using unbiased, physically-based, Monte Carlo path tracing techniques.

Arnold render