Earlier this month, Intel released its well-known Embree Ray Tracing library for the Arc GPUs. Earlier employed to accelerator ray-tracing on multi-core CPUs, Embree is now available on popular rendering tools like V-Ray, MoonRay, Maxon Cinema 4D, etc. The latest update opens up Embree and the rest of the oneAPI Toolkit to the Arc GPU family. Compared to the Core i9-12900K, the Arc A750 sees a speedup of up to 30x in path tracing using Embree 4.2.
The Arc A750 was benchmarked against NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 in Chameleon RT path tracer using Embree, NVIDIA OptiX, and Vulkan. The A750 is up to 30% faster than the RTX 3060 in the open-source path tracer courtesy of Embree. The GeForce card running on Vulkan comes close to the Arc GPU running Embree, but the latter wins four out of nine tests.
The RTX 3060 is slightly faster using Vulkan in the other benchmarks, but the deltas will probably shrink with future updates. The best part about Embree 4.2 is backward compatibility, allowing support for prior APIs. The popular rendering tool Blender can accelerate ray tracing using oneAPI on multiple Intel GPUs by combining Embree and Open Image Denoise.
