In case you are not aware, the Blender Cycles is a render engine with a physically based path tracer which was introduced more than a decade ago. As time moved on, the rendering pipeline shifted from CPU rendering to that of GPU rendering and it now supports CUDA/OptiX for NVIDIA GPU and OpenCL acceleration for AMD GPUs. The upcoming Blender 3.3 LTS update is now going to bring Cycles of rendering for the Intel API. This is going to let Intel GPUs to fully utilize their architectures.
While at SIGGRAPH 2022, Bob Duffy, Intel’s Director of Graphics Community Engagement, showcased Intel’s Tiger Lake based system running on Blender Cycles with live denoising running on Arc A770 GPU along with raytracing. The CPU used here is the NUC 11 Extreme featuring Intel 11th Gen Core KB-series. While the NUC 11 was used here, it was understood since a long that the Arc A-series will be paired with NUC 12 Extreme.
Only a few days ago, Intel announced the Arc A50 and the A40 GPUs which have been designed for professional work. These cards were specifically designed keeping in mind raytracing acceleration, video encoding, and machine learning. However, both cards are based on the low-end Alchemist GPU. We are waiting for the ACM-G10 based Arc PRO model which is very likely to be announced later on.
Intel’s Arc A770 is going to be the company’s flagship model of the Alchemist desktop series and will feature a full ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe-Cores and a GDDR6 memory of 16 GB.
Example of what I showed at #SIGGRAPH2022. Dense scene with indirect lighting in #B3D, rendering Cycles raytracing in realtime viewport with live denoising, rendered on #IntelArc A770 GPU in a NUC 11 Extreme PC pic.twitter.com/db89fSuGgP
— bobduffy 🖱️🎨 (@bobduffy) August 13, 2022