Intel Releases OSPRay 3.0 With Initial GPU Acceleration

Following other Intel oneAPI components like Embree and OpenVKL introducing GPU acceleration via SYCL, today Intel released the open-source OSPRay 3.0 that rolls out initial GPU support for this portable ray-tracing engine.

OSPRay as one of Intel's many excellent open-source software projects is a scalable and portable ray-tracing engine that's long been optimized for CPU-based rendering. But now with OSPRay 3.0 there is preliminary support for GPU acceleration. OSPRay 3.0 is making use of SYCL with the oneAPI DPC++ for targeting Intel Xe GPUs from the Intel Arc Graphics up through the Data Center GPU Flex Series and Max Series. With SYCL plug-ins for CUDA and ROCm it's also possible to utilize SYCL on AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards, thanks to that work by Codeplay Software.

For this initial OSPRay 3.0 release though the GPU support is considered beta and there are a number of features not yet implemented for the GPU path.

OSPRay 3.0 also adds optimizations to its MPI module, various other optimizations, updating the various Intel oneAPI software dependencies, and other changes.

Downloads and more details on OSPRay 3.0 via GitHub. I'll be running some OSPRay 3.0 CPU and GPU benchmarks soon on Phoronix.