Intel's Embree 4.2 Promotes Its SYCL GPU Support Out Of Beta

Intel today released Embree 4.2 as the newest feature update to this open-source and high performance ray-tracing library. While Embree has long offered fast CPU-based ray-tracing support, Embree 4.0 introduced GPU acceleration via SYCL. With the Embree 4.2 release, the GPU SYCL support is no longer being treated as beta.

Embree 4.2 now considers the SYCL version of Embree to no longer be in beta phase with this GPU acceleration having proved itself during the v4.0 and v4.1 series. In other words, the SYCL GPU support is now expected to be officially stable for use not only on Intel Arc Graphics and their other GPUs but also multi-vendor support via this Khronos standard too.

Embree 4.2 also enhances the BVH build performance on many-core systems for applications that over-subscribe threads. There is also a fix to avoid having Intel oneAPI Level Zero be a dependency for CPU-only rendering and other fixes.

Windows / Linux / macOS binaries along with the Apache 2.0 licensed source code for Embree 4.2 is available from GitHub.