Intel releases Open Image Denoise 2
Render denoising with Open Image Denoise in Corona. The recently released Open Image Denoise 2 makes Intel’s formerly CPU-only render denoising system compatible with GPUs from AMD, Intel itself and Nvidia.
Intel has released Open Image Denoise 2, the next major version of its open-source render denoiser, integrated into CG applications like Blender, Cinema 4D and Houdini.
Open Image Denoise 2.0 (OIDN 2.0), released in late May, made the formerly CPU-only denoiser compatible with current AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs.
The 2.01 update, released last week, improves performance on Intel integrated graphics.
An AI-driven hardware-agnostic render denoiser
First released in 2019, Open Image Denoise is a set of “high-performance, high-quality denoising filters for images rendered with ray tracing”.
The technology is now integrated into a range of DCC tools and renderers, including Arnold, Blender’s Cycles render engine, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Modo, V-Ray and Unity, where it is used to denoise lightmaps.
OIDN builds on neural network library oneDNN, meaning that like Nvidia’s OptiX GPU denoising technology – also integrated into many renderers – it uses AI techniques to accelerate denoising.
But unlike OptiX, OIDN isn’t hardware-specific: while it was designed for Intel 64 CPUs, it supports “compatible architectures”, including AMD CPUs and Apple’s M-Series processors.
Now runs on both CPU and GPU
To that list, we can now add GPU architectures: Intel previewed GPU support in Open Image Denoise last year, with the functionality becoming publicly available in OIDN 2.0.
(Confession time: the update was actually released at the end of May, but we only spotted it while researching a story on Chaos’s Vantage 2.0 renderer, which incorporates OIDN.)
The change should enable software developers to take advantage of the full processing power of users’ machines, and to support CPU and GPU denoising with a single code base.
Supports discrete GPUs from AMD, Intel and Nvidia, plus Intel integrated graphics
As with CPU denoising, GPU denoising is hardware-agnostic, being supported on AMD GPUs via HIP, on Intel GPUs via SYCL, and on Nvidia GPUs via CUDA.
OIDN 2.0 supports AMD’s RDNA 2 and 3 architectures, so it should be compatible with Radeon RX 6000 and 7000 Series and Radeon Pro W6000 and W7000 Series GPUs.
It also supports Intel’s own Xe-HPG architecture, used in new discrete GPUs from the Arc Pro A-Series.
And it supports Nvidia GPU architectures from Volta onwards, so it should be compatible with desktop cards as far back as 2018, including GeForce RTX consumer GPUs and Quadro RTX and RTX workstation GPUs.
OIDN is also supported on the integrated GPUs in Intel’s Core, Pentium and Celeron processors, with the 2.01 update improving performance on integrated graphics under Linux.
Availability and system requirements
Open Image Denoise 2 is compatible with 64-bit Windows, Linux and macOS. You can find a full list of CPU and GPU architectures supported on the OIDN website.
Both source code and compiled builds are available under an Apache 2.0 licence.