Intel Embree ray-tracing library earns Academy Scientific and Technical Award

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Intel Embree ray-tracing library, a component of the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit, a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award. The Academy, which hosts the annual Academy Awards, recognizes Intel Embree’s ray tracing for geometric rendering as a contributing innovation in the moviemaking process.

The Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit provides powerful libraries for high-fidelity and high-performance visualization applications, binary packages for open source code and executable tutorials for demonstrating some capabilities. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel Embree
Ray-tracing methods combine the physics of light with 3D objects and their surface materials to generate lifelike images, including mathematically correct reflections, refraction, shadows, and more. Rendering developers, graphics application engineers, and content creators use Intel Embree to deliver high-performance, high-fidelity visual experiences.

Intel Embree’s production-ready capabilities allow creators to inject photorealism through premier, realistic lighting effects such as reflections and shadows on hair, fur, mirrors, or any object; complex motion blur for multiple moving objects like vehicles, propellers and birds; and complex geometries like ray-oriented disks, spheres and normal-oriented disks to render particle effects such as sand and foam. This is in addition to other features, such as multi-level instancing.

“The Intel Embree team continues to push the envelope on rendering and ray tracing while delivering benefits to visual storytellers around the world. This award is a timely recognition for the passion and persistence of this team. We look forward to bringing more visual computing breakthroughs with our upcoming XPU platforms with X^e architecture,” said Raja Koduri, Intel senior VP, chief architect, and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software.

Purpose
Intel Embree helps developers optimize rendering applications on existing hardware to use advanced technologies, such as Intel SIMD and Intel AVX-512 on Intel Xeon and Core processors and emerging Intel XPU platforms, such as Intel X^e architecture (GPUs). Customers achieve real-time performance, fast render cycles, cost-efficient production and memory savings — more time spent on quality rendering and less time on compute.

“We are humbled and honored to receive this award. It is a wonderful acknowledgement of our efforts to deliver open software technology, cleverly utilizing ever-improving computing platforms, to unbridle creativity taking motion pictures and animation to amazing levels of visual impact in storytelling,” said Jim Jeffers, senior principal engineer and senior director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization Architecture at Intel. “Intel Embree is the culmination of many years of research, industry collaboration and software development — playing a pivotal role in greatly enhancing visual experiences with photo-realistic content.”

Intel Embree is widely used in movie studio rendering pipelines. Its ray tracing capabilities include studio photorealistic visual effects, animated films, scientific visualization, 3D product, and architectural design, and gaming visuals such as terrain and shadows. The open source library is also integrated into many popular industry rendering tools.