More OSL shaders and complex procedural nodes now run natively on Nvidia RTX cards. Refined CPU Sampling

The GPU rendering engine in Arnold 4.x has seen massive performance improvements, offering near-parity with CPU quality while reducing render times drastically. It now supports more complex shaders and faster hair rendering.

Texture loading is now on-demand, preventing GPU crashes on massive scenes.

While you won’t get the latest 2025 features (like Imagers or OpenPBR), version 4.4.0 is no slouch.

In production environments, "newer" does not always mean "better." Many animation studios and motion designers intentionally lock their pipelines to specific versions of Cinema 4D (like R21, R22, or R23) to preserve plugin compatibility, script integrations, or active project stability.

What (motion graphics, character animation, architectural visualization) do you render most?

Integrated Open Image Denoise (OIDN) now runs natively on CPU.

| Cinema 4D Version | IPR Start Time | Final Render (1080p, 4spp) | GPU Denoise Time | Crashes (8hr test) | | :---------------- | :------------- | :------------------------- | :--------------- | :----------------- | | | 11.2 seconds | 2m 41s | 4.3 seconds | 0 | | R22 | 9.8 seconds | 2m 38s | 4.2 seconds | 0 | | R23 | 6.4 seconds | 2m 29s | 4.1 seconds | 0 |