Embree 4.0.1 Released With Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series Support

Embree 4.0.1 is out with a few changes to note for this open-source high performance ray-tracing library for CPUs and GPUs.

Last month Intel's open-source oneAPI software engineers released the Embree 4.0 ray-tracing library complete with support for Arc Graphcs via SYCL usage with their oneAPI stack. Embree 4.0 also delivered some nice performance improvements for CPU use while the SYCL/GPU support was one of the main focuses for Embree 4.0. That's now been succeeded by Embree 4.0.1 with a few more improvements.

Most notable with Embree 4.0.1 is adding support for Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series hardware. The DG2/Alchemist-based Data Center GPU Flex Series cards are now fully supported with Embree 4.0.1 for enjoying SYCL offloading, similar to the Arc Graphics support added in the prior release.

Embree 4.0.1 also has improved performance for running on Intel CPU families of Tiger Lake, Comet Lake, Cannon Lake, Kaby Lake, and Skylake CPUs by now preferring 256-bit SIMD instructions by default.

This Embree point release also has a few different bug fixes but most notably is the Data Center GPU Flex Series support and the 256-bit SIMD default usage for the mentioned Intel CPU families.

Source downloads along with Windows and Linux binaries for Embree 4.0.1 are available from GitHub.

Intel on Thursday also released OSPray 2.11 with various fixes, support for double-pumped NEON instructions on AArch64, and various optimizations.