Intel's oneAPI Support Appears To Be In Good Shape For Blender 3.3

Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux.

As mentioned last month, the initial oneAPI GPU rendering support was merged. This support though is limited to Intel's discrete Arc Graphics hardware and not current integrated graphics.

The support was initially Windows-focused but by the September launch the Linux driver support is expected to be in good shape. This meta tracker around oneAPI device support for the Cycles renderer shows the just-in-time (JIT) compilation working on both Windows and Linux, but the ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation being disabled currently due to increased continuous integration build times. This initial oneAPI support also lacks hardware ray-tracing support for what is otherwise capable with the Alchemist GPUs.

Other later work items for the Blender oneAPI integration include host memory fallback should the vRAM be exhausted, memory sharing between devices, and improving the build integration. Other outstanding oneAPI patches for Blender can be found via this search.

For showing off the progress, last week at SIGGRAPH 2022, Intel was showing off Blender 3.3 with oneAPI acceleration (sadly though, on Windows). An Intel Arc A770 was used for that Blender 3.3 demo:

Example of what I showed at #SIGGRAPH2022. Dense scene with indirect lighting in #B3D, rendering Cycles raytracing in realtime viewport with live denoising, rendered on #IntelArc A770 GPU in a NUC 11 Extreme PC pic.twitter.com/db89fSuGgP

— visualbob 🖱️🎨 (@bobduffy) August 13, 2022

Blender 3.3 is expected to be released on 7 September. Blender 3.3 also gets the AMD HIP acceleration working on older Radeon GPUs, among many other improvements over Blender 3.2.