Intel's Rendering Toolkit Turns To More Open, Community-Welcoming Development Model

Intel's oneAPI Rendering Toolkit with the likes of OSPRay, Embree, OpenVKL, Open Image Denoise, and others has been open-source for years. But it's not been exactly an open-source development model with making it easy for independent contributors to propose code changes. But Intel has now decided to make these projects more like traditional open-source projects and welcoming community contributions -- including from different hardware vendors.

The Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit with Embree, Open Image Denoise, Open VKL, Open PGL, OSPRay, and OSPRay Studio will now follow a more open-source development model. Intel's formerly internal development branches as well as feature branches will now be hosted in the open on GitHub. The source code remains available under Apache 2.0.

With now developing new feature code in the open and having their active code branches in the public, it's easier to track their development by outside parties and easier to suggest code changes/features rather than just seeing open-source code drops with new releases. A great move by Intel and one that arguably should have been the way from the project start.

Intel hopes this move will lead to more cross-company development, transparency into development, and more community-driven features for these high performance graphics libraries.

More details on this shift in Intel Rendering Toolkit development via community.intel.com.