The Intel Arc Alchemist GPU Shows Off in a New Blender Benchmark

Intel Graphics has released a video that shows the 3D rendering program Blender being accelerated on an Intel Arc Alchemist GPU.

Bob Duffy, Senior Software Evangelist & Developer Affinity Programs Manager at Intel, demonstrates how well the real-time rendering preview works with a little Arc desktop muscle.

After a brief introduction, Duffy walks us through the process of configuring Blender to use the unannounced Intel GPU. Following that, he performs some short scene alteration and renders at fantastic preview quality in the viewport. Duffy explains how the new Intel Arc Alchemist desktop GPU works in Blender, saying that in this example, the GPU especially denoises the quickly produced scene, making it appear a lot more pleasant and polished. Blender, according to Duffy, leverages AI to exploit 'Intel Open Image Denoise.'

Duffy also demonstrates how rapidly Blender can refresh the high-quality preview when the attributes of materials in the scene are changed. To show this, he repeatedly alters the refractive index of the glass item in the center of the scene. The depth of field adjustment is also shown by Intel's Software Evangelist. Most of you will be acquainted with the depth of field effect, but in summary, it is a photography effect in which objects outside of the selected focus plane get blurred. It is a well-known and popular portraiture method, and owing to software/AI, every new smartphone can now duplicate or mimic it. Duffy finished the film with a final render of the tabletop scenario. It took 7.3 seconds and appeared quick, but he didn't give any scene render comparison speeds using known GPUs from any vendor.

This new Blender with Intel Arc acceleration technologies embedded in will be available "sometime in Q2," which is also when we can expect to see discrete desktop GPUs. Remember that the Intel Arc laptop GPUs will be available on Wednesday. Intel appears to be eager for their Arc GPUs to succeed, since a teaser video with the date 3/30/22 joined the Blender video shown earlier today in Intel's social media feeds.

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