Blender Ray-Tracing: Intel Aiming For oneAPI RT In 3.6, AMD HIP-RT Working Internally

While NVIDIA users have been enjoying hardware ray-tracing with the Blender 3D modelling software for years with the OptiX back-end and RTX GPUs, the ray-tracing support for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics is still coming together for this industry-standard, open-source 3D modelling software.

This week a status update was shared concerning Blender's ray-tracing support both for AMD's HIP back-end and the Intel oneAPI back-end for Arc Graphics hardware.

Back in September we heard that AMD hopes to have hardware ray-tracing for Blender 3.5. This week the latest on the AMD "HIP-RT" front is that AMD has hardware ray-tracing working internally with Blender. However, "stability and performance are still being worked on" and necessary driver changes haven't yet been worked out into an official release yet.

AMD expects to post a patch for early design review soon around AMD HIP-RT for Blender, but it's not clear yet if it will be ready for Blender 3.5 or end up being pushed back further, especially if there are still stability and performance issues.

On the Intel oneAPI ray-tracing front, Intel engineers are planning to have their ray-tracing support ready for Blender 3.6.

These updates were shared at yesterday's render and cycles meeting.

Blender 3.4 is expected to be released next week on 7 December while Blender 3.5 is expected for release on 15 March but with the "bcon2 - improve and stabilize" period beginning 4 January. Blender 3.6 meanwhile should be out next summer.