Boost Ray Tracing Performance for Arc GPUs

The Intel Embree Ray Tracing library has recently been updated by Intel, taking the ray-tracing performance on the Arc GPUs to new heights.

Intel Embree 4.2 Version Outperforms NVIDIA’s Rival in Ray Tracing Performance on Arc GPUs

To summarize, Intel Embree is a “open source library of ray tracing kernels” that professionals in the media sector use to improve the efficiency of rendering systems. According to Intel, the film has been recognized for its contributions to the industry by a number of organizations, including Chaos V-Ray, Dreamworks MoonRay, Mercenaries Engineering Guerilla, Maxon Cinema 4D, and many more, with the ” Scientific & Technical Achievement Award”.

The impact of Intel’s Embree technology is expanding significantly due to the media industry’s desire for innovation, which is why the new Intel Embree 4.2 version has raised the bar. The incorporation of oneAPI’s SYCL implementation for Intel’s discrete GPU (Arc series) is the key change introduced in the most recent release. SYCL is comparable to a multi-architecture royalty-free open standard, giving developers more flexibility over their individual code, including the ability to reuse it across hardware targets and tune it for a particular accelerator.

Embree, a component of Intel’s oneAPI Rendering Toolkit, has also been made available for the Arc series. Developers now have the option to “write C++ code for either CPUs or GPUs independently,” which cuts down on development time and code maintenance. To show the functionality of the technology, Intel benchmarked its Arc A750 CPU against the i9-12900K CPU using the same single source renderer.

The findings above demonstrate that the Arc platform, particularly in commercial applications, will greatly improve following this update. Customers now have the option of switching to Arc GPUs from CPUs for quicker rendering performance, which is not just a cost-effective choice but, in some cases, significantly better.

A feature cannot be compared to its competitors in order to make its whole argument. This suggests that Intel has also benchmarked the Arc A750 against the GeForce RTX 3060, the Arc A750’s closest rival from NVIDIA. Since NVIDIA uses the NVIDIA OptiX and Vulkan features to improve rendering performance, the comparison of the two technologies yields some intriguing findings. Using the publicly accessible ChameleonRT route tracer, Intel tested both GPUs.

At an OptiX vs. Embree comparison, the Intel Arc A750 outperforms the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 while exhibiting comparable Vulkan performance. When it comes to upscaling and rendering technology, Intel has indeed closed the gap.

Additionally, Intel Embree 4.2 will support earlier API features and include backward compatibility. Additionally, Blender‘s 3.6 LTS now supports the technology, and Intel has also offered a demonstration to highlight the capabilities of Embree on Blender.

The open-source library for Intel’s Embree 4.2 is currently available on GitHub but has not yet been included in the oneAPI Rendering Toolkit. It’s fascinating to see what Intel has in store for users, especially given that the company has been actively raising the Arc platform and increasing its functionality for both professionals and gamers. The library can be downloaded from this page, and developers can also benefit from SYCL, which enables simple migration from CUDA source codes to enable deployment across a variety of devices (architecture/vendor agnostic).