ARNOLD vs CYCLES (Research)

This is the result of an intense research of a scene with photogrammtry objects using color, roughness and normal maps and a HDR map for image based lighting. I am using a DELL XPS 15 9560 with i7-7700HQ and GTX 1050.

I tried to set both scenes for rendering as close as possible. The renderer settings use 64 samples for Camera AA and 64 samples for all other sample passes. In Cycles I use Branched Path Tracing.

In Blender all materials are setup the same way with the Principled shader like in Arnold with the Standard shader.

This simple example shows that Cycles will match the Arnold quality. This is no surprise because both are using the same modern methods of Path Tracing with raytracing and Global Illumination.

It showed up that both renderer are nearly equal in render time with this scene. Arnold renderers less noise especially in the darker area on the floor.