Intel Releases OpenVKL 2.0 With Intel GPU Acceleration Via SYCL

Similar to Embree 4.0 adding Intel graphics acceleration earlier this year via SYCL, Intel's OpenVKL library that is also part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit has now added SYCL graphics acceleration with OpenVKL 2.0.

OpenVKL 2.0 was just released today as the newest major update to this open-source volume kernel library. OpenVKL provides a collection of high performance volume computation kernels. OpenVKL has long been quite good on CPUs -- and even non-Intel and non-x86_64 platforms -- while today's OpenVKL 2.0 release is the first time adding GPU support via SYCL. Intel Arc Graphics, Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series are all supported by OpenVKL 2.0. The SYCL support in this phase is currently considered beta.

OpenVKL 2.0 also takes the opportunity to make various API changes and additions. Plus there are new OpenVKL examples for demonstrating GPU usage. The OpenVKL superbuild has also been updated against all of the latest oneAPI dependencies.

Downloads of this open-source VKL library as well as binaries for Windows / Linux / macOS are available via GitHub.