Earlier this month, Intel released its popular Embree Ray Tracing library for Arc GPUs. Previously used to speed up ray tracing on multi-core CPUs, Embree is now available on popular rendering tools like V-Ray, MoonRay, Maxon Cinema 4D, and more. The latest update opens Embree and the rest of the oneAPI toolkit to the Arc family of GPUs. Compared to the Core i9-12900K, the Arc A750 sees up to a 30x speedup in path tracing using Embree 4.2.
The Arc A750 was compared to NVIDIA's RTX 3060 in the Chameleon RT path tracer using Embree, NVIDIA OptiX and Vulkan. The Arc A750 is up to 30% faster than the RTX 3060 in the open-source path tracer thanks to Embree. The GeForce card running Vulkan comes close to the Arc GPU running Embree, but the latter wins four out of nine tests.
The RTX 3060 is slightly faster with Vulkan in other benchmarks, but deltas will likely reduce with future updates. The best part of Embree 4.2 is backwards compatibility, which allows support for earlier APIs. Popular rendering tool Blender can accelerate ray tracing using an API on multiple Intel GPUs by combining Embree and Open Image Denoise.