Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Release Notes (2021)

ID 686447
Updated 11/23/2021
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Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit contains a set of rendering and ray-tracing libraries that are designed to help you transform big amounts of raw data into rich, realistic visuals and are optimized for the continuum of visualization needs. This page includes the release notes and issues associated with the toolkit. For software and hardware requirements, please refer to System Requirements page.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit includes the following components:

Components distributed elsewhere:

Version History

Date Version Major Change Summary
September 2021 2021.4 All components updated. Open VKL major release. OSPRay Studio Python* binding support.
June 2021 2021.3 All components updated
March 2021 2021.2 All components updated
December 2020 2021.1 Initial Rlease

Where to Find the Release

Please refer to the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit page for more information on how to acquire the package.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit 2021.4

New in This Release

Note: Intel® Implicit SIMD Program Compiler (Intel® ISPC) 1.16.0 is the minimum version of Intel ISPC that is compatible with latest Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components.

 

Intel® Embree 3.13.1

Updates
  • Added support for ISPC+ARM. 
  • Releases upgrade to TBB 2021.3.0 and ISPC 1.16.1
 
 

Intel® OSPRay 2.7.0

Updates
  • Add support for transformation and camera Motion Blur (with the path tracer) via shutter parameter of the camera and motion.transform array and time parameter of the instance and camera
  • OSPRay can now be built for ARM64 CPUs with NEON (e.g., Apple M1) using the superbuild. Thus, new minimum versions are for ISPC 1.16.0, for Embree 3.13.1 and for rkcommon 1.7.0
  • OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v1.0.0 to bring the following improvements:
    • Configurable background values for all volume types (default NaN), defining region outside the volume domain
    • Better default sampling rate for scaled VDB volumes, improved robustness
    • Structured regular volumes now support tricubic filtering and more accurate gradient computations as well as more robust isosurfaces
  • The multidevice module contains a new OSPRay device implementation that delegates work to any number of subdevices. This is an experimental feature in this release but we invite feedback
  • SciVis Renderer now ignores normal/albedo/depth hits on surfaces that are fully transmissive (material d = 0)
  • Changed the behavior of background rendering in SciVis renderer to more closely reflect that of the path tracer: Background hits are rendered in background color in the albedo buffer and black in the normal buffer
  • Fixed crash on exit when using the MPI device
  • Fixed rendering of depth buffer in the example application
  • The first argument to material constructor ospNewMaterial, i.e., renderer_type, is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. AO and SciVis renderers still assume "obj" like behavior for all material types

 

Unsupported or Discontinued Features
  • The SciVis renderer does not compute depth of field (DoF) anymore, as this effect does not align with the SciVis renderer definition and exposed artifacts
  • Deprecated the xfm parameter of the instance, use transform instead
  • Dependencies Google Benchmark, GoogleTest, and Snappy moved out-of-source to superbuild ExternalProjects

 

Intel® Open Image Denoise 1.4.1

Updates
  • Fixed crash when in-place denoising images with certain unusual resolutions
  • Fixed compile error when building for Apple Silicon using some unofficial builds of ISPC
 

Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library 1.0.0

Updates
  • The version 1.0 release marks long term API stability (until v2.0)
  • Open VKL can now be built for ARM CPUs that support Neon
  • Iterator API updates:
    • Introducing interval and hit iterator contexts, which hold iterator-specific configuration (eliminates value selector objects)
    • Interval and hit iteration is now supported on any volume attribute
    • Interval iterators now include a time parameter
    • Interval iterators now support the intervalResolutionHint parameter, replacing maxIteratorDepth and elementaryCellIteration
  • Supporting configurable background values; default is now VKL_BACKGROUND_UNDEFINED (NaN) for all volume types
  • vklGetValueRange() now supports all volume attributes
  • Added ISPC-side API bindings for vklGetNumAttributes() and vklGetValueRange()
  • Structured regular volumes:
    • Added support for tricubic filtering
    • More accurate gradient computations respecting filter mode
    • Hit iteration robustness improvements
  • VDB volumes:
    • Interval and hit iteration robustness improvements
    • Corrected interval iterator nominalDeltaT computation for non-normalized ray directions and non-uniform object-space grid spacings
    • Fixed bug which could cause incorrect value range computations for temporally varying volumes
  • vklExamples additions demonstrating:
    • Multi-attribute interval / hit iteration
    • Configurable background values
  • Temporally varying volumes
  • Superbuild updates to latest versions of dependencies
  • Now requiring minimum versions:
    • Embree 3.13.1
    • rkcommon 1.7.0
    • ISPC 1.16.0

 

Intel® OSPRay Studio 0.8.0

Updates
  • Compatible with OSPRay release v2.7.x
  • Release binaries are built with python bindings for Python 3.7
  • Features/Improvments
    • Support for OSPRay's camera Motion Blur and Transformation Motion Blur for animated glTF scenes
    • Support for UDIM texture tiling workflow
    • New transfer functions and color maps for volume rendering
    • Much improved search widget for scene objects and materials
    • Large scene performance optimization
    • Added ImGui docking and viewport support (experimental)
    • Updated external 3rd party dependencies bringing in features and bug fixes
    • Modified OBJ importer to parse and use quads and triangles
    • Improved Arcball camera navigation with up-vector lock
  • Bugs Fixes
    • Fixed materials after clearing scene
    • Fixed materials for PointCloudData (PCD)
    • Can no longer create a zero-dimension framebuffer
    • Fixed instancing node-naming to allow for for many identical instances
    • Fixed crash if optional glTF punctual light color was omitted
    • Fixed crash if isosuface geometry is used as clipping geometry when no other geometries are in the scene

 

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Utilities (rkUtil) 1.3.0

New Features
  • Updated target component build scripts to build the latest component versions.

 

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit 2021.3

New in This Release

Note: Intel® Implicit SIMD Program Compiler (Intel® ISPC) 1.15.0 is the minimum version of Intel ISPC that is compatible with latest Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components.

Intel® Embree 3.13.0

Updates
  • Added support for Apple M1 CPUs.
  • RTC_SUBDIVISION_MODE_NO_BOUNDARY now works properly for non-manifold edges.
  • Embree no longer reads the .embree3 config files, thus all configuration has to get passed through the config string to rtcNewDevice.
  • Releases upgrade to TBB 2021.2.0 and ISPC 1.15.0
 
Unsupported or Discontinued Features
  • Embree no longer reads the .embree3 config files, thus all configuration has to get passed through the config string to rtcNewDevice.

Intel® OSPRay 2.6.0

Updates
  • Added new intensityQuantity type OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_SCALE for the hdri and sunSky light source. For the future this is the only supported quantity for these lights, the value OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_RADIANCE is deprecated. When OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_SCALE is used for sunSky the default value of intensity is 0.025 to match the old behaviour
  • The MPI module is included in the releases packages. An MPICH-ABI compatible build is provided for Linux that can be run with the Intel oneAPI HPC Toolki, MPICH, and other MPICH-ABI compatible MPI distributions. The Windows release is built against MPI provided in the Intel oneAPI HPC Toolkit
  • OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v0.13.0 to bring the following improvements:
    • Support half precision float (fp16) voxel data in strutured volumes (regular and spherical) and VDB volume
    • Supporting tricubic filtering via VKL_FILTER_TRICUBIC filter for VDB volume
    • Fixed artifacts for isosurfaces of unstructured volumes
    • Performance improvements for isosurfaces when multiple isovalues are selected
    • Better, adaptive sampling of AMR volumes
  • The mpiOffload and mpiDistributed devices now support picking. Picking in the distributed device will return the globally closest object on the rank that owns that object. Other ranks will report no hit
  • Messages issued from ISPC code use the same reporting path as the C++ code, thus now the whole OSPRay console output can be consistently filtered with log levels
  • Open VKL and Embree internal errors are now correctly mapped to their corresponding OSPRay errors
  • Fix behavior of committing the framebuffer in distributed rendering to match that of local rendering
Unsupported or Discontinued Features
  • Added new intensityQuantity type OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_SCALE for the hdri and sunSky light source. For the future this is the only supported quantity for these lights, the value OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_RADIANCE is deprecated. When OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_SCALE is used for sunSky the default value of intensity is 0.025 to match the old behaviour

Intel® Open Image Denoise 1.4.0

Updates
  • Improved fine detail preservation
  • Added the cleanAux filter parameter for further improving quality when the auxiliary feature (albedo, normal) images are noise-free
  • Added support for denoising auxiliary feature images, which can be used together with the new cleanAux parameter for improving quality when the auxiliary images are noisy (recommended for final frame denoising)
  • Normals are expected to be in the [-1, 1] range (but still do not have to be normalized)
  • Added the oidnUpdateFilterData function which must be called when the contents of an opaque data parameter bound to a filter (e.g. weights) has been changed after committing the filter
  • Added the oidnRemoveFilterImage and oidnRemoveFilterData functions for removing previously set image and opaque data parameters of filters
  • Reduced the overhead of oidnCommitFilter to zero in some cases (e.g. when changing already set image buffers/pointers or the inputScale parameter)
  • Reduced filter memory consumption by about 35%
  • Reduced total memory consumption significantly when using multiple filters that belong to the same device
  • Reduced the default maximum memory consumption to 3000 MB
  • Added the OIDN_FILTER_RT and OIDN_FILTER_RTLIGHTMAP CMake options for excluding the trained filter weights from the build to significantly decrease its size
  • Fixed detection of static TBB builds on Windows
  • Fixed compile error when using future glibc versions
  • Added oidnBenchmark option for setting custom resolutions
  • Upgraded to oneTBB 2021.2.0 in the official binaries

Errata:

  • If runtime errors occur with unusual resolutions or compiler errors occur on Apple* based platforms, please use version 1.4.1.
  • As of publication 1.4.1 it is available from source from the respository.
 

Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library 0.13.0

Updates
  • Driver (now device) API changes:
    • Renamed VKLDriver to VKLDevice and updated associated device setup APIs
    • Use of multiple concurrent devices is now supported; therefore vklNewVolume() and vklNewData() now require a device handle
    • Renamed the ispc_device module and ispc device to cpu_device and cpu, respectively
    • The OPENVKL_CPU_DEVICE_DEFAULT_WIDTH environment variable can now be used to change the cpu device’s default SIMD width at run time
    • Added new VKLTemporalFormat enum used for temporally varying volume parameterization
  • VDB volumes:
    • Support for temporally structured and temporally unstructured (TUV) attribute data, which can be used for motion blurred rendering
    • Supporting tricubic filtering via VKL_FILTER_TRICUBIC filter type
    • Added support for half precision float-point (FP16) attribute data via VKL_HALF data type
    • Added a new InnerNode observer and associated utility functions which allows applications to introspect inner nodes of the internal tree structure, including bounding boxes and value ranges
    • Renamed VKL_FORMAT_CONSTANT_ZYX to VKL_FORMAT_DENSE_ZYX
  • Structured regular and spherical volumes:
    • Added support for half precision float-point (FP16) attribute data via VKL_HALF data type
  • Unstructured volumes:
    • Added support for elementary cell iteration via the elementaryCellIteration parameter
    • Robustness improvements for hit iteration
  • AMR volumes:
    • Improved interval iterator implementation, resolving issues with returned interval nominalDeltaT values
    • Interval iterators now support maxIteratorDepth parameter
  • Interval and hit iteration performance improvements when multiple values ranges / values are selected
  • Added new temporal compression utilities which applications can use for processing temporally unstructured attribute data
  • vklExamples additions demonstrating:
    • Motion blurred rendering on temporally structured and temporally unstructured vdb volumes
    • Tricubic filtering on vdb volumes
    • Half-precision floating-point (FP16) support for structuredRegular, structuredSpherical, and vdb volumes
    • Elementary cell interval iteration on unstructured volumes
    • Use of the InnerNode observer on vdb volumes
  • Superbuild updates to:
    • Embree 3.13.0
    • rkcommon 1.6.1
  • Minimum rkcommon version is now 1.6.1

 

Intel® OSPRay Studio 0.7.0

Updates
  • Compatible with OSPRay release v2.6.x
  • Add SceneGraph python bindings Access to scene graph concepts from python3 environment Simple examples provided
  • Expose support for OSPRay / Open VKL Particle Volume primitives
  • Add PCD (Point Cloud Data) file importer - ascii and binary formats
  • Transfer function and isosurface enhancements provide more control over volume visualizations
  • Support OSPRay's varianceThreshold for adaptive accumulation
  • glTF and camera animation improvements
  • UI improvments Camera manipulator dolly and focal distance/depth-of-field Quick select common frame sizes Denoiser can be enabled/disabled without resetting accumulation
  • Add UI parameters to demo scene generators for better interactivity

Unsupported or Discontinued Features

  • The oneAPI release of OSPRay Studio 0.7.0 does not include Python bindings support. For Python bindings support, please build 0.7.0 from the repository or with the superbuild Make sure to enable bindings with USE_PYSG set to on.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Utilities (rkUtil) 1.2.0

New Features
  • Updated target component build scripts to build the latest component versions.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit 2021.2

New in This Release

Note: Intel® Implicit SIMD Program Compiler (Intel® ISPC) 1.15.0 is the minimum version of Intel ISPC that is compatible with latest Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components.

Intel® Embree 3.12.2

Updates
  • Bug fixes
 
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® OSPRay 2.5.0

Updates
  • Re-add SciVis renderer features: Colored transparency, colored shadows​; Fix light leaking artifacts at poles of HDRI (and Sun-Sky) light
  • Re-add cones and cylinder geometry
  • Light sources are visible including HDRI Light environment map
  • Removed limit on the number of volumes (both overlapped and separate)
  • Add intensityQuantity parameter to light sources to control the interpretation and conversion of the intensity into a radiative quantity
 
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® Open Image Denoise 1.3.0

Updates
  • Improved Denoising Quality
  • Directional Lightmap Support
  • Apple Silicon Support
  • Bug Fixes
 
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library 0.12.0

Updates
  • Added support for temporally varying volumes, which can be used to implement motion-blurred rendering.
  • VDB multi-attribute volume support.
  • Performance improvements for structured and VDB volume sampling.
  • Robustness improvements for interval iteration on structured, VDB, and unstructured volumes.
  • Bug Fixes

Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® OSPRay Studio 0.6.0

Updates
  • glTF loader improvements: Animation and skinning of triangle meshes KHR_lights_punctual support for glTF Lights and experimental environmental lights Initial glTF KHR_materials_* extensions and KHR_texture_transform support. Add support for glTF POINTS primitive for point clouds Support GLTF scene cameras Added rich image generation containing GeomIDs and InstanceIDs, exported as additional exr layers
  • Scene File: Load/Save scene file with model transforms, material, lights and camera state
  • UI improvements Lights editor, add/remove/edit lights for easy scene lighting Camera path and keyframe editor Camera type and parameter editor Rendering stats window added Add UI to adjust volume "filter" mode Transfer function widget for volumes
  • Core Add curves geometry Initial isosurface support for volumes Expose SceneGraph support for clipping geometries Implement an AssetsCatalogue to avoid re-importing assets, simply instance Import raw structured and spherical files with specific volume nodes

Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Utilities (rkUtil) 1.1.0

New Features
  • Updated target component build scripts to build the latest component versions.

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit 2021.1

New in This Release

Note: Intel® Implicit SIMD Program Compiler (Intel® ISPC) 1.14.1 is the minimum version of Intel ISPC that is compatible with latest Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components. Intel ISPC v1.14.1 use is strongly encouraged due to many quality of life compatibility benefits.

Intel® Embree 3.12.0

New Features
  • Added linear cone curve geometry support. In this mode a real geometric surface for curves with linear basis is rendered using capped cones. They are discontinuous at edge boundaries.
  • Enabled fast two level builder for instances when low quality build is requested.
Changes to Existing Features
  • Bugfix for BVH build when geometries got disabled.
  • Added EMBREE_BACKFACE_CULLING_CURVES cmake option. This allows for a cheaper round linear curve intersection when correct internal tracking and back hits are not required. The new cmake option defaults to OFF.
  • User geometries with invalid bounds with lower>upper in some dimension will be ignored.
  • Increased robustness for grid interpolation code and fixed returned out of range u/v coordinates for grid primitive.
  • Fixed handling of motion blur time range for sphere, discs, and oriented disc geometries.
  • Fixed missing model data in releases. 
  • Motion blur BVH nodes no longer store NaN values.
  • Ensure compatibility to newer versions of Intel® oneAPI Threading Building Blocks (oneTBB).
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® OSPRay 2.4.0

New Features
  • The pathtracer optionally allows for alpha blending even if the background is seen through refractive objects like glass, by enabling backgroundRefraction 
  • Intel OSPRay now requires minimum Intel Open VKL v0.11.0 to bring the following improvements: 
    • Improved rendering performance of VDB volumes
    • Added support for configurable iterator depth via the maxIteratorDepth parameters for unstructured and particle volumes, improved performance
    • Added support for filter modes for structured volumes (regular and spherical)
  • Expose parameter horizonExtension of Sun-sky light, which extends the sky dome by stretching the horizon over the lower hemisphere
Changes to Existing Features
  • Optimize handling of geometry lights by the pathtracer
  • The optional denoiser image operation now respects frame cancellation, requiring Intel® Open Image Denoise with minimum version 1.2.3
  • Fixed normals of (transformed) isosurfaces
  • Robust calculation of normals of boxes geometry
  • Clipping geometry is now working correctly with map_maxDepth renderer parameter
  • Using materials in a renderer with a mismatched renderer_type no longer causes crashes while rendering
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® Open Image Denoise 1.2.4

New Features
  • Added OIDN_API_NAMESPACE CMake option that allows to put all API functions inside a user-defined namespace
Changes to Existing Features
  • Fixed bug when TBB_USE_GLIBCXX_VERSION is defined
  • Fixed compile error when using an old compiler which does not support OpenMP SIMD
  • Export only necessary symbols on Linux and macOS
  • Added compatibility with oneTBB 2021. 
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library 0.11.0

New Features
  • Introduced API support for multi-attribute volumes, including APIs for sampling multiple attributes simultaneously 
    • Initially only structuredRegular and structuredSpherical volume types support multi-attribute data
  • Iterator APIs now work on sampler objects rather than volumes, supporting finer-grained configurability
  • Observers can now be created for both volume and sampler objects 
    • LeafNodeAccess observers must now be created on sampler objects
  • Log and error callbacks now support a user pointer
  • vdb volume interval iterators: 
    • Added support for elementary cell iteration when maxIteratorDepth is set to VKL_VDB_NUM_LEVELS-1
    • Up to 2x faster iteration
  • unstructured and particle volume interval iterators: 
    • Improved interior empty space skipping behavior
    • Added support for configurable iterator depth via the maxIteratorDepth parameter
  • Added support for filter modes in structuredRegular and structuredSpherical volumes
  • amr volumes now support method parameter on sampler objects
  • Added new interval_iterator_debug renderer in vklExamples to visualize interval iteration behavior
Changes to Existing Features
  • Hit iterator accuracy improvements for unstructured volumes
  • Fixed bugs in amr and vdb volume bounding box computations
  • Fixed bug in unstructured volume gradient computations near empty regions
  • Minimum Intel ISPC version is now v1.14.1
  • Integration with oneTBB 2021
Unsupported or Discontinued Features

No features were deprecated.

Intel® OSPRay Studio 0.5.0

New Features
  • New Component Offering
  • Intel OSPRay Studio is an open source and interactive visualization and ray tracing application that leverages Intel OSPRay as its core rendering engine. It can be used to load complex scenes requiring high fidelity rendering or very large scenes requiring supercomputing resources.
  • The main control structure is a scene graph which allows users to create an abstract scene in a generic tree hierarchy. Scenes can either be imported or created using scene graph nodes and structure support. The scenes can then be rendered either with a pathtracer or a scivis renderer.
     

Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Utilities (rkUtil) 1.0.0

New Features
  • New Component Offering
  • Render Kit superbuild is the first utility to be offered to end users.
  • Render Kit superbuild will automatically download the entire recipe of Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit Source code, oneTBB binaries, Intel ISPC binaries and will build binaries for each component.
     

Workarounds/Troubleshoot

macOS*:

oneTBB dynamic runtime errors while using XCode*

Users may see issues in an XCode* IDE developer environment when setting up dynamic runtime search paths. Apple* System Integrity Protection may purge these paths.

Windows* OS:

Pre-built sample application runtime errors

Base Kit users may have dynamic runtime issues when running Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit prebuilt applications. For an environment variable script mitigation, try these steps when using Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit:

  • Start a new shell environment.
  • Run the oneAPI <oneapi_install_directory>\setvars.bat script in your shell.
  • Next, run the rkcommon vars.bat file. Find it here: <oneapi_install_directory>\rkcommon\latest\env\vars.bat

The goal with the above mitigation is for pre-compiled applications to use TBB 2020 Update 3 runtime libraries included with the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit. This dependency is as opposed to the oneTBB 2021 branch included with the Base Kit.

Base Kit users who wish to run Base Kit only programs:

  • Start a new shell environment.
  • Run the oneAPI setvars.bat script in your shell.

Notices and Disclaimers

Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.

No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Your costs and results may vary.

© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

No license (express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise) to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document.

The products described may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the product to deviate from published specifications. Current characterized errata are available on request.

Intel disclaims all express and implied warranties, including without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, as well as any warranty arising from course of performance, course of dealing, or usage in trade.

Product and Performance Information

1

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.