Open Image Denoise ready for Battlemage

If you had Battlemage GPU you could already use this software.

Intel has an open-source image denoising library, available under the Apache 2.0 license. This library is part of the Intel Rendering Toolkit, which includes various tools for rendering, ray tracing, denoising, and path guiding, so stuff indirectly related to gaming but mainly useful for professional rendering.

Intel says that the Open Image Denoise library uses algorithms pre-trained with artificial intelligence. It aims to provide high-quality and easy-to-use denoising tools for users, primarily focusing on Intel GPUs, including the Intel Xe and as it was just announced, the new Xe2 architecture. However, it is not just limited to Intel graphics.

The Xe architecture features the latest discrete GPUs, known as Alchemist. These GPUs are available in discrete (Xe-HPG) and integrated (Xe-LPG) forms. The recent update also adds support for the Xe2 architecture , covering both discrete and integrated segments. The changelog mentions additional support for Intel Lunar Lake, currently the only official product with Xe2 architecture. It also confirms support for the upcoming Xe2-HPG , also known as the Battlemage GPU series, which has not yet been released.

Intel Open Image Denoise supports a wide variety of CPUs and GPUs from different vendors:

• Intel® 64 architecture compatible CPUs (with at least SSE4.1)
• ARM64 (AArch64) architecture CPUs (e.g. Apple silicon CPUs)
• Intel Xe and Xe2 architecture dedicated and integrated GPUs, including Intel® Arc™ A-Series Graphics, Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series, Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series, Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics, Intel® Core™ Ultra Processors with Intel® Arc™ Graphics, 11th-14th Gen Intel® Core™ processor graphics, and related Intel Pentium® and Celeron® processors (Xe-LP, Xe-LPG, Xe-LPG+, Xe-HPG, Xe-HPC, Xe2-LPG, and Xe2-HPG microarchitectures)
• NVIDIA GPUs with Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Hopper architectures
• AMD GPUs with RDNA2 (Navi 21 only) and RDNA3 (Navi 3x) architectures
• Apple silicon GPUs (M1 and newer)

The library does also support NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple graphics, making it compatible with all major architectures released to date, despite its primary focus on Intel graphics.

Sadly, this software update is the only update we got on Battlemage this month, as Intel did not share any new info during its Computex keynote. Perhaps, this was to be expected due to the company’s new policy on how it communicates Arc GPU updates after facing significant delays with Alchemist. Worth adding that whispers from Intel board partners at Computex suggest that the Battlemage series might be released next year.

Source: Github