Intel Preparing More oneAPI GPU Accelerated Components For Blender

Blender 3.3 is set to be released today and one of the exciting enhancements with this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software update is initial support for Intel oneAPI/SYCL GPU acceleration. Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs can now enjoy this accelerated Cycles back-end, permitting your driver stack is new enough on Windows or Linux and are using their new dGPUs and not existing integrated graphics. But this is just the start of their oneAPI GPU-accelerated push for Blender.

Blender 3.3's oneAPI back-end complements the AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA / OptiX back-ends already within Blender for GPU acceleration. It will be interesting to test the Blender 3.3 release to see how well the oneAPI GPU back-end works in practice under Linux and performs against the NVIDIA and AMD back-ends.

To the Blender 3.3 Cycles release notes, an interesting addition was recently made:

Going forward we can expect more great things from Intel’s Blender community collaborations. Development is underway to add Intel® Embree Ray Tracing GPU hardware acceleration support and Intel® Open Image Denoise AI GPU acceleration in Cycles for Intel GPUs.

Blender has already embraced Open Image Denoise integration and Embree usage going back to older releases albeit have been for the CPU-based paths. This goes along with Intel ramping up their investment into Blender over the past two years.

Intel's oneAPI is one of many great open-source software initiatives from the company I've been eagerly covering since its inception. With Arc Graphics coming to market, their oneAPI efforts are all the more interesting.

So looking ahead to future releases past today's Blender 3.3, it is now publicly indicated their intentions are for also working on getting their GPU acceleration support wired up for other oneAPI software components used by this 3D modeling software.