Originally written in C99 and progressively rewritten in C++, Arnold runs natively on x86 and Apple CPUs, where it tries to take advantage of all available threads and SIMD lanes for optimal parallelism.

For complex scenes such as the space station in Elysium, it makes heavy use of geometry instancing, which helps it render trillions of visible polygons in a reasonable amount of memory.

[2] Arnold is based on the Monte Carlo Path Tracing algorithm, making extensive use of importance sampling and other numerical techniques to improve the quality of rendered images.

"[13] On 21 October 2021, the Television Academy recognized Fajardo, along with colleagues Alan King and Thiago Ize, with an Engineering Emmy statuette for the Arnold Global Illumination Rendering System.

[9] Notable television series include Game of Thrones, Westworld, Trollhunters, LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS, Foundation, The Mandalorian, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and 3 Body Problem.