Intel Releases Embree 4.0 With Arc Graphics Support Via SYCL

Intel today introduced Embree 4.0 as a major update to this high performance ray-tracing library.

Most significant with the Embree 4.0 release is initial support for GPU acceleration with Arc Graphics. Embree has long supported its ray-tracing kernels for CPU execution not only with x86_64 Intel/AMD processors but also other architectures as well. Now with Embree 4.0 is initial support for GPU execution via targeting SYCL for cross-platform compatibility while the predominant focus is for their own graphics processors with Arc Graphics and the Intel GPU Max Series.

With the Embree 4.0 release the GPU/SYCL support is considered alpha quality with the GPU performance not yet being fully tuned and some features possibly missing. In any case it's great to see the SYCL support land with Embree 4.0 now being available and it will continue to be refined over future releases.

Embree 4.0 also brings new APIs, ray masking is now enabled by default, various ARM fixes, and dropping support for the deprecated Intel Compiler with instead focusing on the Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compiler.

Intel Embree 4.0 sources along with binaries for Windows/macOS/Linux via GitHub. I'll be firing up Embree 4.0 shortly for checking out its CPU performance and also seeing how well the SYCL implementation is working for Arc Graphics A750/A770.