SIGGRAPH 2016 is full of surprises.
Autodesk announced that with Maya 2016 they decided to ditch Mental Ray and replace it with Arnold. I gotta say... Of all things AD did over the years...
This is kinda cool.
Still, AD being AD, batch rendering will cost you extra.
Luckily, interactive rendering (that is rendering from Maya) doesn't require a separate Arnold license. This means that Maya now comes with probably the most renowned production rendering solution (albeit CPU-only) by default.
Not bad... Not bad at all, AD.