From the course: V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max Essential Training

A word about Intel Embree

From the course: V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max Essential Training

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A word about Intel Embree

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- If you, like myself, are one of those software users who love to poke around in the bowels of an application's options, then it probably won't take you too long, seeing as it really isn't hidden in the bowels at all, to find your way into V-Ray Settings tab, and spot the Use Embree option. Now if you are wondering just what Embree is, well simply stated it is a collection of high performance Ray Tracing Kernels developed at Intel for graphics applications that want to improve performance by leveraging kernels that are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest processors. That is, processors that support SSE, EVX, EVX 2, and Intel Xeon PHI coprocessor vector instructions. The V-Ray 3 help file from Chaos Group does remind us that in order to use the Embree library with V-Ray, we do need a compatible processor. One that supports SSE 4.2. If we enable this switch on a processor that isn't compatible, then we may find ourselves experiencing what Chaos Group describe as, "undefined behavior." Which basically means that things could start acting a little weirdly. Indeed, even using a compatible processor, I have, on rare occasions, seen Embree create some odd rendering artifacts. The brilliant thing, though, for V-Ray users who do have compatible processors installed is that a significant speed up in scene rendering can be experienced in the majority of use cases. Which isn't surprising, seeing as Embree contains algorithms that have been optimized for what Intel describes as, "incoherent workloads." That is Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithms. And, "coherent workloads," or primary visibility and hard shadow rays. Both of which feature heavily in V-Ray.

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