Intel’s Embree – Photo-Realistic Ray Tracing Kernels

Intel has just released a collection of Code Kernels to do photo-realistic ray-tracing entirely using instruction accelerators (SSE and AVX) on the CPU.

Embree is a collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels, developed at Intel Labs. The kernels are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest Intel® processors with support for the SSE and AVX instruction sets. In addition to the ray tracing kernels, Embree provides an example photo-realistic rendering engine. Embree is designed for Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithms, where the vast majority of rays are incoherent. The specific single-ray traversal kernels in Embree provide the best performance in this scenario and they are very easy to integrate into existing applications.

The results are beautiful I must admit, and a stab against GPU-accelerated raytracers like iRay.  However, they haven’t published any details on the time required for rendering other than to say “a perfect result in about a minute” on one particular model. You can get a few more details in this short video from the creators:

via Embree – Photo-Realistic Ray Tracing Kernels – Intel® Software Network – Intel® Software Network.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.