Intel has announced the release of the Open Image Denoise (oidn) 2.0 project, a collection of filters designed to eliminate noise in images created using ray tracing. The project has been developed as part of a larger initiative, the oneApi rendering toolkit, which aims to develop software visualization calculations, including a library of ray tracing, a system of photorealistic rendering, a distributed ray tracing platform, and a software rasterization system. The code for the project is written in C++ and published under the Apache 2.0 license.
The main goal of the OIDN project is to provide high-quality, effective, and easy-to-use noise reduction functions that can improve the quality of ray tracing results. The project’s proprietary filters enable the final quality to be comparable to the result of a much more costly and time-consuming process of detailed rendering, based on the result of an abbreviated cycle of ray tracing.
OIDN ensures a cut off of random noise that occurs when tracing rays via the Monte Carlo numerical integration method (MCRT). When using such algorithms to achieve high-quality rendering, it is necessary to trace a very large number of rays; otherwise, noticeable artifacts in the form of random noise appear on the final image.
OIDN significantly reduces the number of calculations required when calculating each pixel, enabling much faster and noisier image generation and then brings it to an acceptable quality with the help of quick noise suppression algorithms. On the presence of appropriate types of equipment, the filters can be used even for interactive trace of rays with noise elimination on the fly.
The library can be used on a wide range of devices, including laptops, PCs, and different types of clusters. The tools are optimized for various types of 64-bit CPU Intel, including SSE4, AVX2, AVX-512, and XMX (XE Matrix Extensions), NVIDIA (based on architectures of Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Hopper), Apple Silicon chips, and AMD (based on architecture RDNA2 (NAVI 21) and RDNA3 (Navi 3x)). The minimum requirement is SSE4.1.