After a long delay, Intel has finally released an improved version of its very popular Intel Embree Ray Tracing library, promising to take the “ray tracing” experience on Arc GPUs to the next level.
Put simply, Intel Embree is an “open source library of multiple ray tracing cores”, used by media industry professionals to enhance the performance of rendering platforms and speed up processes. As Intel highlights, this gadget has received the “Science & Engineering Achievement Award” for its practical contributions to the field of technology – communication, for various companies such as Chaos V- Ray, Dreamworks MoonRay, Mercenaries Engineering Guerilla, Maxon Cinema 4D, etc
With the need for innovation in the communications industry, the influence of gadgets like Intel’s Embree is growing. That is why the new version of Intel Embree 4.2 is expected to bring a series of remarkable improvements to meet the needs of the market.
One of the significant changes included in the new release is the integration of oneAPI’s SYCL implementation for Intel’s discrete GPUs (Arc product family). For those unfamiliar with SYCL, it is similar to a multiarchitecture royalty-free open standard that gives developers greater control over their respective code, including the use of reused on hardware targets and customized for a specific accelerator.
As part of the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit, Embree has also expanded to the Arc family. Intel Embree 4.2 gives developers the ability to “write C++ code for the CPU or GPU independently”, greatly reducing code development and maintenance time. Intel compared the Arc A750 with an i9-12900K CPU to demonstrate the capabilities of this feature, both on a single source renderer.
The above results show that the Arc platform will benefit significantly after this Embree update, especially in commercial applications. Intel has offered consumers the option to switch to Arc GPUs for faster rendering performance, which is not only a move that saves costs, but in some cases is far superior to performance. rendering capacity provided by the CPU.
To evaluate this, Intel also compared the Arc A750 with the rival NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. NVIDIA uses NVIDIA OptiX and Vulkan features to enhance rendering performance, so when comparing the two technologies , the results are quite interesting. Intel has benchmarked both GPUs with the ChameleonRT tool, and the results are as follows:
The Intel Arc A750 beats NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 when comparing OptiX to Embree, but shows similar results with Vulkan. Intel has really closed the gap in rendering and upscaling technology compared to the competition.
In addition, Intel Embree 4.2 will come with backward compatibility to support previous API features. The technology has also been supported in Blender’s 3.6 LTS, and Intel has also provided a demo showcasing Intel’s Embree capabilities on Blender.
Embree 4.2 is yet to be released in the oneAPI Rendering Toolkit. However, users can find the open source library on GitHub. The library is now available for download, and developers can also take advantage of SYCL, which includes easy migration from the CUDA source code so that it can be deployed on a variety of devices.